Immunophenotypingk

June 2016

Please do not add promotional material to Wikipedia. While objective prose about beliefs, organisations, people, products or services is acceptable, Wikipedia is not intended to be a vehicle for soapboxing, advertising or promotion. Your editing looks very much like an attempt to use Wikipedia to increase the visibility of particular work, which you presumably have some connection to. If that is not the case, please explain what the purpose is. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 12:08, 8 June 2016 (UTC)

reply

I am adding information to wikipedia which my line manager has told me to. Information which she has already been given the go ahead by another wikipedia editor, who had the same reaction you did when she first started adding this information months ago. While it IS to increase a visibility of a particular work, which we DO have connection to... the work is open source and the data is freely available to the scientific community, and the information which we are adding is merely information and not advertising in any way. Please look up immunophenotyping.org and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (WTSI) and the International Mouse Phenotyphing Consortium (IMPC) for more information. Our work is non-profit and publicy funded and putting up on wiki that this work is available doesn't derive us any benefit. —  Preceding unsigned comment added by Immunophenotypingk (talk • contribs) 12:17, 8 June 2016‎

Whether the work is "non-profit" and/or publicly funded is irrelevant: editing for the purpose of using Wikipedia to promote, publicise, or "increase visibility" is not permitted. Also, if you are editing because your "line manager" has told you to, so that you are editing in relation to an organisation you work far, then in Wikipedia's terms you have a conflict of interest, and should not be editing articles in connection with your work. Furthermore, if your editing is in relationship to work for which you are paid, then the Wikimedia Foundation's terms of use require you to disclose the exact nature of your paid position in relation to your editing. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 15:55, 8 June 2016 (UTC)

And updating information which is already up, which was put up months ago by colleagues of mine - is not allowed too?

Dear JamesBWatson,

Thanks you very much for your comment. My name is Lucie and I am the line manager, please feel free to continue the discussion with me.

We are part of an open access phenotyping project based at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge in the UK. The project has a long tradition of posting data on Wikipedia, started by Darren Logan. I volunteered to update old pages and add new data last year, and after a new big data release have now received help by my colleague above. The wording we currently use has been updated for the posts last year and was drafted with Darren's advice. We feel it is important to mention who we are and thus vouch for the quality with our good name, just as we would in a peer-reviewed research article. The data posted in Wikipedia is obviouslsy highly condensed so anybody who is really interested will need to go and learn more on our web pages. We aim to make as much raw data accessible as possible since we believe our users should be able to judge for themselves, but in order to do this they will need some background information on how the data was obtained and how analysis was conducted. I am sure as a mathematician you will be able to relate to this. Please let me know if this addresses your concerns.

Kind regards, Neblion (talk) 17:19, 8 June 2016 (UTC)

Hi. I am also concerned about the addition of IMPC data to Gene Wiki articles. In particular, the statement A conditional knockout mouse line ... was generated at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. It is almost never appropriate to state who did or funded the study directly in a Wikipedia article. Those that are interested can find out from a citation. Also the same generic citations (PMID 21677750, 21677718, 17218247, 23870131) are being added to a large number of articles. This amounts to citation spam. Focus on what the study says about the protein, not what the protein says about the study. In addition, this material is often being added to very short articles, hence the material that is added overwhelms the rest of the material (see WP:UNDUE). There is already an article on the International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium. A better solution might be to add the phenotype information to {{Infobox gene}} including a wikilink to IMPC. I suggest that you ask WT:MCB if there is community consensus to add IMPC to Gene Wiki articles, and if so, what would be most appropriate way to display the data. Boghog (talk) 05:49, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

There was a series of discussions at WT:MCB a number of years ago, the result of which was the current formatting. I agree that the text A conditional knockout mouse line ... was generated at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is overly promotional - there is no reason that mention of WTSI cannot simply be removed. I'm not so sure I agree that WP:UNDUE is an issue here, the same could be said of adding an infobox to gene article stubs. Sure they need to be expanded, but restricting the inclusion of phenotypic information is not exactly helping in that regard. Likewise, I don't agree that the addition of the IMPC citations are link spam, years ago this was suggested as an effort to establish the notability and global collaboration behind IMPC, and hence justify why their data in WP gene article was merited. There was not a huge amount of enthusiasm to add these data to an infobox at the time, hence the current format. That all said, times change and if there is a different consensus now than we should certainly respond to that. Rockpocket 11:43, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

Please provide a link to the previous discussions. As far as I am aware, the previous discussion at WT:MCB was the format of the {{Infobox gene}} and not model organisms. The only previous discussion of the IMPC that I am aware of was here. I have searched the WT:MCB and Portal:Gene Wiki/Discussion archives and I found no other IMPC discussions. Concerning citations, we don't include attribution to Entrez, Ensembl, UniProt, or the PDB in every Gene Wiki article. What we do provide is a wiki link to an appropriate database article. What I am suggesting is if the phenotype data were moved to the infobox, a Wikilink to IMPC would be sufficient attribution. Boghog (talk) 16:14, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

• It is clear both from what Immunophenotypingk has said and from what Neblion has said that their purpose is to post information to Wikipedia in order to publicise information about their project. I have looked at a number of "references", and not one of them actually linked to a source which supported the content to which the "reference" was attaced in the Wikipedia article. Some of the references were abstracts, and it is possible that the actual articles contain content supporting the statements to which they are attached, but even if that is so, the references to the abstracts do not support the relevant content in the Wikipedia articles.
• No doubt there have been many studies, conducted by numerous scientists in different institutions, which have some relevance to the subjects of the articles in question, and singling out studies from one institution and giving them such prominence in so many articles is certainly disproportionate. Indeed, one of the main reasons why Wikipedia's guidelines on conflict of interest discourage one from editing articles on subjects to which one has a close personal connection is that one tends to see the part of the subject in which one is personally involved as bigger and more significant than would someone who sees the subject from a more detached and distant perspective.
• The fact that "the project has a long tradition of posting data on Wikipedia" does not automatically mean that doing so must be acceptable. There are many cases of people editing in ways that are out of line with Wikipedia standards for a very long time before it is noticed: this does not tend to happen in popular, mainstream subjects which get a lot of attention, but in specialist subjects such as the one we are concerned with here it can easily happen.
• I became involved in this issue by investigating a report at Administrator intervention against vandalism, because the links which were being given as references looked like spam. There is clearly no "vandalism" involved, as the editors involved have obviously been acting in perfectly good faith, and the word "spam" also has connotations of deliberate abuse which are not appropriate here. Nevertheless, there are problems. At the very least we have editors who unambiguously fall under Wikipedia's definition of conflict of interest, and who should therefore be very cautious about editing in this subject area at all. (I think that "conflict of interest" is an unfortunate choice of words, as in other contexts that expression means something rather different, but that is the form of words which has become established in Wikipedia.) We also have content added to articles which, both on the basis of what it looks like and on the basis of what editors have said above, is clearly there more in order to use Wikipedia articles to call attention to a project than to elucidate information in the Wikipedia articles. I have to agree with Boghog that excessive weight is given to information relating to that project. Not only do we have references which seem to be provided more as a way of attracting people to the papers that they refer to than to give support to content in the Wikipedia articles, but it even seems likely that the content to which the "references" are attached was put there for the purpose of attracting people to the links which are called "references"; "anybody who is really interested will need to go and learn more on our web pages" is a little ambiguous, but it certainly can be read as indicating that the intention of posting the information was to attract such "really interested" people to those web pages.
• The conclusions of all this are as follows. (1) People from the "International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium" have been extensively editing in ways which are certainly discouraged by the guideline on "conflict of interest". (2) That editing is also certainly done with the purpose of using Wikipedia to publicise that project, contrary to Wikipedia's policy on promotional editing. For those two reasons, such editing should not continue. (3) It is at the very least arguable that the content added is disproportionate, giving undue weight, contrary to Wikipedia's policy on neutral point of view; if that is so, then the content should not remain in the articles. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 19:51, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

I see that Rockpocket is a member of faculty at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, and is therefore not an independent observer. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 19:51, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

Notice of Conflict of interest noticeboard discussion

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard regarding a possible conflict of interest incident with which you may be involved. Thank you. SmartSE (talk) 18:01, 28 November 2023 (UTC)