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Hello, I'm TJRC. I noticed that you added or changed content in an article, Lakewood, Ohio, but you didn't provide a reliable source. It's been removed and archived in the page history for now, but if you'd like to include a citation and re-add it, please do so. If you need guidance on referencing, please see the referencing for beginners tutorial, or if you think I made a mistake, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Thank you. TJRC ( talk) 15:20, 13 August 2019 (UTC) reply

Also, David Conte; all your edits to that article are without footnotes and sources. That article is already a bit of a mess with respect to sourcing. Any edits should make it better, not worse. TJRC ( talk) 15:24, 13 August 2019 (UTC) reply

Hello, thank you for your feedback! David Conte is a living composer of international reputation spanning multiple decades, and academic appointments and numbers of compositions and so forth are not necessarily information that is published in a newspaper or some linkable news media source. I see this practice quite regularly when it comes to living figures in academia. The entries represent an update to biographical facts. I believe his page has been improved, and at his request, by the addition and refinement of the information that is presently there. Regarding the Lakewood, Ohio page, where Professor Conte was born, I see more than half of the entries on that page without any attribution nor source whatsoever. Why have you not edited or removed all of those unsourced entries, and targeted only Professor Conte's entry? It appears to be an arbitrary decision. Jasonmartineau ( talk) 17:12, 13 August 2019 (UTC) reply

I'm moving your reply here. Better to keep the discussion in one place.

On the Conte article: to be clear, I am not proposing the article to be deleted, and am not making any claim that Conte is not notable. The issue is that you are adding material to the article without providing citations to back them up. It has nothing to do with Conte; it has everything to do with the way the article is being edited. There are links in the message above that should help guide you in this.

If you are arguing that living composers are somehow exempt from Wikipedia verification requirements: that's simply wrong. It is not an improvement to add material -- even if true -- that is not published elsewhere. Wikipedia is not a site for publishing material for the first time.

On the Lakewood article: that section is already flagged as having problems: "This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed." It is a misconception that, if an article or a section is already bad, that it is okay to make it worse. That's really not okay.

The reason your addition is reverted is that it got caught right away. The tag on the article is intended to give a heads-up that cleanup of the existing entries is required. Most likely, if that cleanup doesn't happen, those entries will be deleted. Neither the tag, nor the existence of other unsourced entries, is an indication that unsourced entries are acceptable.

Since you added Conte as an entry, I assume you have a verifiable source (i.e., one meeting WP:RS) to support it. If that's the case, re-add it with that source. It is not the content itself that is the problem; it is the sourcing and verifiability. TJRC ( talk) 17:52, 13 August 2019 (UTC) reply

Hello, thank you for your reply. Indeed I've seen the information about sourcing, though it's clear to me that not every relevant fact of a person's life can be sourced. A professor starts a new teaching position at a major institution, it's not published as a fact anywhere, surely this doesn't imply that the information cannot be represented in their encyclopedic entry, does it? Also, this article has been in existence for quite some time, I am merely updating it at the composer's request to reflect accurate information.

You have apparently undone all of my edits to the David Conte page, many of which were actually cleanup edits (such as unlinked mentions of other destinations already on Wikipedia), and not only additions of new information. Hours of work has been removed. Should every claimed sentence on a page have footnote? This makes no sense, and I see no such examples on other composers' pages. Some things are sourced, most things, such as how many works composed, place of birth, etc, are not footnoted. I think there appears to be an overzealous effort to enforce a degree of footnoting and sourcing that is simply unrealistic, and not being enforced elsewhere to the same extent.

No one is implying exemption whatsoever, I'm not sure how you draw that conclusion. The fact is that not every significant event of a public person's life can be demonstrably sourced, and that is frequently noticeable with other academicians' pages. If you are saying that rules are applying to some pages but not others, then that does indeed seem arbitrary.

I'm sorry but the descriptor "bad" is a subjective and pejorative term so I don't know how that is informative or helpful to anyone, or to further imply malicious intent that someone has set out to make something you feel is bad, "more bad". I can assure you quite the contrary, the reason good faith edits are being made here by me is to IMPROVE the page and the information thereupon as best as possible.

And yes, if a majority of entries on a page seem to be living untouched for long periods of time, unsourced, because not every famous person gets a sourceable announcement as to their place of birth, yet it may still be historically relevant, then indeed this, too, appears arbitrary.

I am hopeful that the new improvements to the Conte page will be restored, as it was even less informative previously, so leaving it in that condition is actually also seemingly arbitrary. Thank you. Jasonmartineau ( talk) 18:21, 13 August 2019 (UTC) reply

"Should every claimed sentence on a page have footnote?" Pretty much, yes. Again, if you don't see it on other pages, feel free to challenge that, too, and help get them cleaned up. But please don't use the presence of substandard practices as a justification to engage in those practices yourself.

"because not every famous person gets a sourceable announcement as to their place of birth" Then it should not be published on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not the place where unpublished materials should be published for the first time. See WP:OR.

Look at it this way. You are saying that no publication anywhere has deemed it important enough to publish some fact, such as a birth date, and that Wikipedia should be the place where that's published for the first time. That's a fundamental misunderstanding of this project.

Look, the touchstone here is: do you have reliable published sources ( WP:RS) for the material you are adding? If the answer to that is "yes," then please re-add it, but provide citations to that material. If the answer is "no," then don't add it to Wikipedia. If you really want to put it out on the internet, start a blog or something, don't put it here. Wikipedia cannot be a substitute for your desire to write original unsourced material. TJRC ( talk) 18:30, 13 August 2019 (UTC) reply

I'm sorry, my position is that your assessment of "substandard practices" is not clearly defined, not that it isn't being universally applied (although that is a secondary symptom). I don't read in the WP:OR that every single sentence of an entry about a living person of notoriety that posits a fact have an outbound footnote. No one is writing "original, unsourced material" here. And indeed I'd say that many living persons with bios on this site do not have cited information about their birth dates or other basic facts about their professional lives, they simply have them there because they are facts. Are you suggesting that nothing whatsoever can be posited as fact on the page of a living person who is well-established in their field and with an international reputation unless it is mentioned someplace else, first? Let me look at a few other figures with a similar status: Aaron Jay Kernis, Richard Danielpour, David Noon, Laurence Rosenthal... I could go on. Some of these have been there for 9 or more years, still without the degree of attribution you are attempting to enforce by deleting information supplied here by Dr. Conte himself. The appearance here is that Dr. Conte or myself are being unfairly targeted for an arbitrary enforcement of poorly defined terms. I'm not saying those are "bad" and so here we are being justified in making more "bad", as you earlier wrote, but that actually the requisite granularity of the attributions are what are in question, and the appearance is that these guidelines are otherwise not clear in this case, and there are too many examples to the contrary to suggest reliable clarity as to which facts are okay to include and which are not, but it seems to fail in concept that every single moving thing on a page have a footnote. The article does have outbound citation where applicable already. I am hopeful you will undo your editing of my work and I thank you for taking the time to provide your feedback. Jasonmartineau ( talk) 18:51, 13 August 2019 (UTC) reply

This isn't complicated. If you have a source, cite it. If you don't, leave it out. TJRC ( talk) 19:15, 13 August 2019 (UTC) reply

There is simply no comparable page about a living person I have seen with that degree of citation. More than half of the factual statements on the page of Philip Glass who is another comparable figure, have no citation. I will be happy to cite whatever possible, as much as possible, but the logic behind "cite every moving thing" seems to be overbroad, and, again, overzealously and arbitrarily applied in this case and not others. Nothing can be posited as fact by the person themselves if not first posited elsewhere? I just don't see that universally happening here. Certain facts, sure, makes sense, but every single one of them? This is not evident as a practice on other comparable pages. Jasonmartineau ( talk) 19:50, 13 August 2019 (UTC) reply

Hello, Jasonmartineau. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places or things you have written about on Wikipedia, you may have a conflict of interest (COI). Editors with a COI may be unduly influenced by their connection to the topic. See the COI guideline and FAQ for organizations for more information. We ask that you:

• avoid editing or creating articles about yourself, your family, friends, company, organization or competitors;
• propose changes on the talk pages of affected articles (you can use the {{ request edit}} template);
• disclose your COI when discussing affected articles (see WP:DISCLOSE);
• avoid linking to your organization's website in other articles (see WP:Spam);
• do your best to comply with Wikipedia's content policies.

In addition, you must disclose your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution which forms all or part of work for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation (see WP:PAID).

Also, editing for the purpose of advertising, publicising, or promoting anyone or anything is not permitted. Thank you.-- Jezebel's Ponyo ^{bons mots} 19:16, 13 August 2019 (UTC) reply

Hello, thank you for the information. I was asked by the person who is the subject of the page to clarify the accuracy of his content on his behalf, because I am someone they trust and someone with the skill to do it, and for no other reason. There is no conflict of interest or bias here, but only the desire to make the information as accurate as possible. Jasonmartineau ( talk) 19:43, 13 August 2019 (UTC) reply

Having been asked by the subject to edit the article on their behalf creates a conflict of interest. Please review the links provided in my message above and use the article talk page to request edits using the template {{ request edit}}. Note that if reliable sources aren't included in the edit request, reviewing editors will likely decline to make the change. -- Jezebel's Ponyo ^{bons mots} 19:49, 13 August 2019 (UTC) reply

It stands to reason that no one is more reliable to report about the accuracy of the information about a living person than the living person themselves, but I take your point, and I will check the links. Thank you for your feedback. Jasonmartineau ( talk) 20:00, 13 August 2019 (UTC) reply

The information needs to be verifiable by our readers, otherwise anyone could create an account and add content to an article claiming it to be accurate. This is especially true for our biography subjects. The way that we monitor edits for accuracy is to verify the content through the inclusion of reliable sources, otherwise it is considered original research as what someone personally knows to be true is not verifiable. I'm by no means suggesting that you can't make changes to the article on behalf of the subject, only that you need to follow our policies and guidelines in doing so.-- Jezebel's Ponyo ^{bons mots} 20:09, 13 August 2019 (UTC) reply

Thank you for the clarifications. I'll look into this accordingly. Jasonmartineau ( talk) 20:17, 13 August 2019 (UTC) reply

There are a bunch of helpful people at the Teahouse who can provide guidance if your get stuck or frustrated (or both!).-- Jezebel's Ponyo ^{bons mots} 22:05, 13 August 2019 (UTC) reply