Rjzzp131247

July 2015

Hello, I'm 331dot. I noticed that you made an edit concerning content related to a living (or recently deceased) person on Roberta Piket, but you didn't support your changes with a citation to a reliable source, so I removed it. Wikipedia has a very strict policy concerning how we write about living people, so please help us keep such articles accurate and clear. If you think I made a mistake, or if you have any questions, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Looking at the page, there is a source for the current year. If you have other reliable sources indicating your birth year, please offer them. Also please understand that we have no way of knowing who is on the other end of the computer making edits; if you are indeed the person the page is about, you will need to take steps to verify that. 331dot (talk) 13:09, 11 July 2015 (UTC)

Please email the link listed in this text to start verifying your identity. 331dot (talk) 13:10, 11 July 2015 (UTC)

http://robertajazz.com/uncategorized/hey-wikipedia-and-331dot-i-was-born-in-1965/

Or do I have to prove to you I own my own DOMAIN NAME TOO?

PS there is NO LINK on the page you linked to to verify identity. Why didn't you just contact me via my web site or Facebook page? Do you REALLY need to make this SO DIFFICULT?

Do you have any idea how frigging BUSY I am? Do you think everyone has time to kill staring at their computer screen all day editing Wikipedia articles? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rjzzp131247 (talk • contribs)

Dear Roberta Piket,

I know this has been a frustrating process and I want to help you. I think a little understanding would go a long way here so I'll do my best to summarize the issues at hand without taking up too much of your time.

Please understand that Wikipedia attracts a lot of people who do not have good intentions. People purporting to be other people that they are not with the purposes of adding false information, often slanderous, is a huge problem on Wikipedia. As a result, the community determined to enact policies that would not allow editors to take it on "face value" of someone's word everything they say to be correct when it comes to content in biographical articles. The editorial benchmark on here is to use reliable secondary sources to verify all information. These policy would prevent someone pretending to be you from making changes to your article that were not true.

This can be frustrating for the very individuals who are being written about. Surely they know more about themselves than anyone and should have the final say in content in the article about them? Having a conflict of interest has also created a lot of problems for Wikipedia. Often individuals will edit and alter their article to what they would like to be publicly displayed (not necessarily the truth) and often by also editing away content they deem negative. I recently moderate a situation where two individuals were purporting to be the person in the article. One editor was trying to remove references to a criminal conviction, and the other was trying to grossly exaggerate it. The criminal conviction turned out to be true and was widely reported in the mainstream media in some very reliable sources: Bloomberg, the New York Times, Reuters, etc. This is one of the many hundreds of cases dealt with on a daily basis on Wikipedia and why sometimes primary sources are discounted. If someone says they were never criminally charged on their personal website it doesn't necessarily make it true.

Birth dates are less controversial (well sometimes as we all saw with Barack Obama). Posting on your personal website does bring a sense of authenticity to your claim and I am reviewing what options we have available to authenticate your ID. That being said, there is a time and a place for primary sources to be used. Your "word" using your Wikipedia account does not, but your website post might qualify.

Wikipedia is volunteer run. 331dot was following the rules we have in place that are actually meant to protect individuals, such as yourself, from false information being added to articles about you. No editor is above the rules we have here regardless of whether they felt you had a genuine claim or not. I imagine you would feel even more angry if editors allowed another individual to write negative and false things about you on your article provided they stated on they were you. It is not their responsibility to contact you off Wikipedia or chase down the truth. They are already doing a thankless task by preserving the integrity of the project by simply reverting changes to biographical articles that do not provide a source. If a source gets it wrong, which happened in this case, then we cannot protect against that. The source wasn't used because another editor (not 331dot) "read it on the internet it must be true". You could contact allmusic.com as the source of the problem rather than vent your frustrations on a volunteer.

We all have busy lives and getting angry at someone who volunteers their time to revert edits that often contain vandalism or in the very least don't adhere to our policies is not warranted. They have taken the time out of their personal life to read through the policies and edit accordingly. You, on the other hand, came here with seemingly very little understanding of how things work and became understandably frustrated. They continued to treat you in a civil manner (probably similar to what you may receive in the service industry from a paid professional) and in return deserved to be treated the same. There was no need to publicly admonish this editor on your personal website and I hope you reconsider that post. If I may suggest an alternate post that could be used as a primary source:

I am verifying for the English Wikipedia that my birthday is on such and such a date. This website is the official website for Roberta Piket and she can be contacted at this email address.

My regards, Mkdw^talk 17:59, 11 July 2015 (UTC)

I didn't intend to demean anyone. I was trying to get the author's attention. I will edit my blog post. I still say it's ridiculous to believe some random web site when I asked him to contact me directly through my web site or Facebook page. That would have been a more reasonable action rather than "correcting" the entry without any further research. Rjzzp131247 (talk) 23:33, 11 July 2015 (UTC)

Thank you. The new post is certainly useable. The entry was adjusted and uses it as a primary source.

As for your offer to be contacted on Facebook or your website being a "reasonable action", it's a much more complicated situation. There are a number of personal reasons for an editor to not want to do this. As volunteers, they may not have the interest. Doing so is usually a lengthy process that not only involves reaching out, but then needing to explain policies and procedures. Likewise, the person being contact probably hasn't taken the interest to learn the policies or procedures on their own and so time, interest, and commitment are a two way street. The editor that performed the action of reverting edits as part of something called patrolling recent changes. They view a feed of all the hundreds of thousands of recent changes and revert the ones that either contain vandalism or do not adhere to our policies. They will review dozens of changes a minute and so their action might be more reasonable in that scope. It may not be a matter of lack of interest but that they simply do not have the time to treat each one as special case and provide "service" to the editor who has not adhered to the policy. If we had more volunteers this might be possible. My brief explanation here is really only the surface of what the full process entails. I think it's easy to make a lot of assumptions, call something ridiculous, and say why don't you just do this instead, without knowing the full scope of the project and everything that governs it.

If they're being asked to contact you on Facebook or your website, that means needing to disclose their personal Facebook or email address to which some may not want to do. Further, Wikipedia already has a means of communication that is preferable because it's publicly available for everyone to see. As discussed here, we were able to successfully talk about how you could provide us with a primary source.

Wikipedia also has a policy that more-or-less prohibits original research. While you may be willing to be contacted by an editor from Wikipedia, there are others that do not. Unlike professional journalists who are hired by a publication, who possibly know about journalism ethics and went to school for it, and whom have an editor-in-chief to control their activity, Wikipedia does not have this structure. We do not recommend our editors to reach out to the subjects of the articles they are working on and whatever is discussed is generally not useable. The information on Wikipedia relies on other publications that presumably already do this for us. A lot of this seems to have to do with your low opinion of allmusic.com to which it does seem like they did make a mistake. Again, I think you quarrel (if any) should be with them for being a professional publication that failed to fact check their information. Interestingly, AllMusic has an article about them and they're owned by the All Media Network. There are a lot of no-name websites out there, but this one is seemingly a real company and publication. Certainly if the New York Times or another more notable publication had written about you and included your birthday, we would have gone with that. Sometimes you go with what you have and surely you now understand that some random website that also happens to be a professional publication was better than some random and anonymous person on the internet. Even if you ended up being the person in question, they're generally regarded as an unreliable source because of their conflict of interest. Wikipedia does have a few processes in place, as we saw with the outcome of this case, to allow the individuals who have articles about them provide information. It's just a very involved process and you need to find the right volunteer, who is interested in the lengthy process, and willing to talk and coach these newcomers to Wikipedia. Mkdw^talk 00:34, 12 July 2015 (UTC)

Draft:Roberta Piket concern

Hi there, I'm HasteurBot. I just wanted to let you know that Draft:Roberta Piket, a page you created, has not been edited in 6 months. The Articles for Creation space is not an indefinite storage location for content that is not appropriate for articlespace.

If your submission is not edited soon, it could be nominated for deletion. If you would like to attempt to save it, you will need to improve it.

You may request Userfication of the content if it meets requirements.

If the deletion has already occured, instructions on how you may be able to retrieve it are available at WP:REFUND/G13.

Thank you for your attention. HasteurBot (talk) 01:37, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Your draft article, Draft:Roberta Piket

Hello, Rjzzp131247. It has been over six months since you last edited your Articles for Creation draft article submission, "Roberta Piket".

In accordance with our policy that Articles for Creation is not for the indefinite hosting of material deemed unsuitable for the encyclopedia mainspace, the draft has been nominated for deletion. If you plan on working on it further, or editing it to address the issues raised if it was declined, simply and remove the {{db-afc}} or {{db-g13}} code.

If your submission has already been deleted by the time you get there, and you wish to retrieve it, you can request its undeletion by following the instructions at this link. An administrator will, in most cases, restore the submission so you can continue to work on it.

Thanks for your submission to Wikipedia, and happy editing. -- samtar ^whisper 21:12, 17 December 2015 (UTC)