DPU-TPB

Welcome!

Hello, DPU-TPB, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions.

I noticed that one of the first articles you edited was Tiger Pep Band at DePauw University, which appears to be dealing with a topic with which you may have a conflict of interest. In other words, you may find it difficult to write about that topic in a neutral and objective way, because you are, work for, or represent, the subject of that article. Your recent contributions may have already been undone for this very reason.

To reduce the chances of your contributions being undone, you might like to draft your revised article before submission, and then ask me or any other editor to proofread it. See our help page on userspace drafts for more details. If the page you created has already been deleted from Wikipedia, but you want to save the content from it to use for that draft, don't hesitate to ask anyone from this list and they will copy it to your user page.

One rule we do have in connection with conflicts of interest is that accounts used by more than one person will unfortunately be blocked from editing. Wikipedia generally does not allow editors to have usernames which imply that the account belongs to a company or corporation. If you have a username like this, you should request a change of username or create a new account. (A name that identifies the user as an individual within a given organization may be OK.)

Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

• The plain and simple conflict of interest guide
• The five pillars of Wikipedia
• Contributing to Wikipedia
• Tutorial
• How to edit a page and How to develop articles
• How to create your first article (using the Article Wizard if you wish)
• Simplified Manual of Style

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{Help me}} before the question. Again, welcome! —C.Fred (talk) 17:39, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

______________REPLY_________________

CFred -

Thank you for contacting me. As you have mentioned, I am involved in the Tiger Pep Band as an alumni advisor. The reason I am updating the wiki page for the TPB at DPU is that it is extremely OLD and out-of-date. From the best that the alumni advisors can tell, it has not been touched in about seven or eight years. Much has changed about the make-up of the band, the history, the performances, the group's particular membership, etc. As the sole attorney in the alumni advisor group, I was given the task of revising this online content in order to truly reflect the TPB of today. On top of that, we are trying to refocus the band's online image in order to properly maintain its standing both at DePauw and in the world of pep band/ marching band. Please let me know how I can further convince you that I am only doing what is objectively reasonable in order to accomplish the above stated goals and decline further interference from you and/ or other wiki editors - including if I need to draft the entire thing and send it someone in an email format (I'm not a coder or computer scientest at all, so a lot of my edits have been difficult and done multiple times since I'm more comfortable infront of a jury than a computer - this included editing this response to include the help me thingy....since I forgot it).

Thank you.

I'll reply to both comments below. Huon (talk) 21:10, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

December 2014

Thank you for your contributions. Please mark your edits, such as your recent edits to Tiger Pep Band at DePauw University, as "minor" only if they are minor edits. In accordance with Help:Minor edit, a minor edit is one that the editor believes requires no review and could never be the subject of a dispute. Minor edits consist of things such as typographical corrections, formatting changes or rearrangement of text without modification of content. Additionally, the reversion of clear-cut vandalism and test edits may be labeled "minor". Thank you. —C.Fred (talk) 18:11, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

Thanks C.Fred. Again, very very very very new to this. Will you be editing/ proofreading this pages further edits as I drastically change it to reflect the band of today and do you have any particular knowledge of the band that could be useful? Trying to be as compliant and understanding as possible. Thanks.

Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia, your addition of one or more external links to the page Tiger Pep Band at DePauw University has been reverted.
Your edit here to Tiger Pep Band at DePauw University was reverted by an automated bot that attempts to remove links which are discouraged per our external links guideline. The external link(s) you added or changed (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_65qABm4xQU&index=93&list=PL7132D62E7C8E99EE) is/are on my list of links to remove and probably shouldn't be included in Wikipedia. If the external link you inserted or changed was to a media file (e.g. a sound or video file) on an external server, then note that linking to such files may be subject to Wikipedia's copyright policy, as well as other parts of our external links guideline. If the information you linked to is indeed in violation of copyright, then such information should not be linked to. Please consider using our upload facility to upload a suitable media file, or consider linking to the original.
If you were trying to insert an external link that does comply with our policies and guidelines, then please accept my creator's apologies and feel free to undo the bot's revert. However, if the link does not comply with our policies and guidelines, but your edit included other, constructive, changes to the article, feel free to make those changes again without re-adding the link. Please read Wikipedia's external links guideline for more information, and consult my list of frequently-reverted sites. For more information about me, see my FAQ page. Thanks! --XLinkBot (talk) 19:53, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

There are a couple of issues here. First of all, there's a problem with your chosen username because it sounds as if it were a team account, not one representing a single individual. Wikipedia does not allow shared use of accounts, and the username must reflect that. Thus I must ask you to request a username change to conform with the username policy. See WP:Changing username/Simple on how to request a name change. If you want your username to be associated with the Tiger Pep Band or DePauw University, a username such as "John at TPB" would be acceptable (in fact the user who originally created the article was Danieldpu).

Secondly, Wikipedia content should be based on what reliable sources that are independent of the subject have written about it. There are several reasons for this requirement, including that our readers should be able to verify the content and that it should be written from a neutral point of view. For example, "Prof. Hanna, loved by his students, strongly believed that the Tigers playing on the field or the court should always know that regardless of the score, the musicians were always behind them. Hanna led bands at athletic events as large as 100 and as small as 15" sounds more appropriate for the band's self-representation than for an encyclopedia article. It doesn't cite any reliable sources, and one wonders how that's relevant to the incarnation of the band founded in 1995.

YouTube generally is not considered a reliable source since there's no editorial oversight and everybody can upload (almost) anything. It's slightly better if the videos you cite were uploaded by DePauw University's official channel, but those aren't quite independent sources about DePauw's exploits, either - and for all I can tell, they largely don't mention the Tiger Pep Band anyway. What we're instead looking for are articles written by newspapers or reputable magazines (and preferably not just the local paper). I appreciate that such sources may be hard to find and likely won't discuss the band in as much detail as we'd like - but that may be an indication that not all of the current content is all that significant.

The bot that reverted one of your latest edits seems to have been confused. To me it looks as if the bot intended to revert your previous edits, where you indeed added the YouTube link, but came a little too late and reverted a subsequent edit instead.

Beyond emphasizing the importance of third-party sources, I'd like to point you towards WT:WikiProject Marching band, a community of editors interested in marching bands and the improvement of marching band-related articles. I'll leave a note at the Project's talk page asking for assistance, but to me it looks as if an appropriate outcome might be to drastically shorten our coverage of the Tiger Pep Band and to merge it to a related article such as the DePauw Tigers article. Huon (talk) 21:10, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

That was extremely long Huon. I'm a novice. As I've explained to C.Fred, I am an alumni advisor to the TPB. DanielDPU is a fellow almuni advisor and was actually my co-director during our time on campus. The wiki page for TPB hadn't been touched in about ten years - so I'm updating it. As the sole attorney on the alumni advisory committee, I'm trying to objectively update the page and DanielDPU asked me to since he didn't have time this weekend. I'm not a computer scientist or a web page person so the "talk" function everyone keeps giving me advice about means absolutely nothing to me other than gobbidy gook....I can type, hit buttons that say save, and email. Your comments about Prof. Hanna are good feedback, but if you had read the article from DePauw that was cited to, you'd see that it wasn't hogwash. Thanks.

• Before you go making massive changes to the article, there are a number of articles you need to read on here, including WP:COPYVIO, which talks about use of copyrighted material on Wikipedia and the limits for doing things like reprinting lyrics. —C.Fred (talk) 21:52, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

C.Fred

I'm apart of the crew who rewrote and copyrighted the lyrics. If someone had taken the time and read the link I posted that proved that before deleting it earlier, you wouldn't have to keep deleting something I created and copyrighted.

I'm sorry for the length of my replies, it's not my intention to overwhelm you. However, there are once again multiple issues to be addressed:

1. I really must ask you to request a username change. Your current username violates the username policy; this account could be blocked from editing if that's not resolved.
2. It's not enough for Wikipedia that you own the copyright for the lyrics - for content to be used here, it must have been released under a free license that allows everybody to re-use and modify it for any purpose, including commercial purposes. (For example, it would have to be legal for me to print the song's lyrics on t-shirts and sell them for profit without asking you or paying any royalties as long as I credit you as the lyricist.) I have checked the edits where you added the lyrics, but even in retrospect I did not see any link to a page explaining the song's licensing status. WP:Donating copyrighted content may be of interest here. However, even if the licensing issue were resolved, I'm not sure the song's lyrics help provide a better understanding of the band.
3. Other editors beside me have commented on the inappropriate tone of the article ("peacock terms abound"). When one is as closely associated with a topic as you are with the band, it's sometimes hard to judge what is objective and what is not. Thus you should make doubly sure that the content you write summarizes what reliable third-party sources such as newspapers or reputable magazines (and not just the university or the band website) have written about this topic, without embellishment.
4. For every Wikipedia article there is an associated talk page; the one for the band is at Talk:Tiger Pep Band at DePauw University. In general, you can find the talk page via the "Talk" tab at the top of a page, right next to "Article". Huon (talk) 00:17, 27 December 2014 (UTC)

Welcome to Wikipedia. Because we have a policy against usernames which give the impression that the account represents a group, organization or website, I have blocked this account; please take a moment to create a new account with a username that represents only yourself as an individual and which complies with our username policy. It also appears that your account is intended to be used for the purpose of telling the world about an organization, person or cause that you consider worthwhile. Unfortunately, many good causes are not sufficiently notable for their own Wikipedia article, and all users are discouraged from editing in any area where they have an inherent conflict of interest. You may wish to consider one of these alternative outlets.

If your username does not represent a group, organization or website, you may appeal this username block by adding the text {{unblock|reason=Your reason here ~~~~}} below this notice.

You may simply create a new account, but you may prefer to change your username to one that complies with our username policy, so that your past contributions are associated with your new username. If you would prefer to change your username, you may appeal this username block by adding the text {{unblock-un|new username|reason=Your reason here ~~~~}} below this notice. Thank you.

--Orange Mike | Talk 03:40, 29 December 2014 (UTC)