Talk:IMS Health/Archives/2014

Connected contributors and CoI

Two editors now have edited the article (notices posted above) that appear on geolocation to originate with the IMS Health corporate network. If indeed IMS Health employees are editing this page directly it is a violation of our Conflict of interest guidelines. I would invite these editors to read the relevant policies; if there are any questions please contact me on my talk page, or discuss questions here. -- [ UseTheCommandLine ~/talk ] # _ 12:33, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

And upon reviewing the edit history, it appears that several other IP editors may have connections to IMS Health. I have not done a thorough accounting, but at least two IPs in addition to the ones listed above, some of which have made substantial contributions to the article, appear to be connected to IMS Health. -- [ UseTheCommandLine ~/talk ] # _ 12:41, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

The above is accurate. In discussing the situation with UseTheCommandLine, I have since created an account "Jon from IMS Health" to ensure full transparency by indicating that the updates coming from me are indeed from someone within the company. As stated in my user profile, I plan on continuing to be a caretaker of this page to ensure it's up-to-date and accurate (in accordance with Wikipedia's policies) and avoid bias by staying with the facts, and sourcing information aggressively. While technically there is a COI due to who I'm employed by, I am taking great care to provide value to the Wikipedia community by keeping the content and style in-line with other acceptable company pages, and only updating the content where it's outdated or incorrect. To improve disclosure and in accordance with the COI policy, I will announce on this page's talk page any edits I plan on making before implementing them. I hope this satisfies the concern raised above and as a result can remove the COI tag assigned to this page.

On a related note, can someone help with updating the company logo? It's out of date and no longer accurate. It appears that I need to make a lot of edits to get clearance to add a new image to Wikimedia... and I don't have enough edits to make to get that kind of privilege for quite some time. Jon from IMS Health (talk) 21:23, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

The subject of the logo allows me to point out that it is important to make sure that your work here, and anything you add, remove, or produce that is uploaded here (including logos) are licensed as CC-BY-SA. Since it sounds like you are engaging in this editing during work, that may have legal implications as a "work for hire". The specifics are really beyond me, so I encourage you to avail yourself of assistance at WP:HELPDESK or any of the other pages we have intended to assist people with editing. -- [ UseTheCommandLine ~/talk ]# ▄ 22:13, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

I've posted to WP:HELPDESK but got no support. I'm not sure what you want me to do next. What I would request is that the COL tag be removed from the page now that I'll be updating the site with clear transparency. Jon from IMS Health (talk) 15:40, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

I think the CoI tag is appropriate as long as you intend to edit the article. I would advise against you directly editing the page, except for clear and unambiguous errors of fact, per our COI guidelines. Even those, frankly, I would prefer you didn't edit for directly, but mention here. -- [ UseTheCommandLine ~/talk ]# ▄ 17:24, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

I agree that the tag about the problems should be removed after problems are gone, not in anticipation of them being gone at a later date. To upload a new photo go to commons:Special:UploadWizard. I looked at the logo and it is not copyrightable because it is just text, so that is the right place. Helpdesk did not give you support because a lot of people with commercial interests come to Wikipedia asking for volunteer time and offering nothing in return, and because it is so depressing to work with people who want to take more than they give. Might you be willing to volunteer your own time to develop articles in your company's field of expertise, even if in volunteering that time it not promote your company? We are a community here.

It would be a great show of support to start your development of this article by deleting every sentence, statement, and table which does not have a citation after it going to a reliable source. This would put the page in compliance with Wikipedia community guidelines. From there, it could be built out, and as UseTheCommandLine says, community policy is to ask users editing for their company to discuss and propose things on the talk page first. In all things that you do here, consider that people are volunteering their time to build an encyclopedia and not to support paid staff on orders to do PR work. If you also feel like Wikipedia is an important project then perhaps it would be good if before you edited your company article you edited something unrelated to your company. You might find an interesting article to edit at Category:Medicine. Might your company have expertise which could develop a Wikipedia health article in a non-promotional way? Thanks and I would talk more if you ever wanted guidance. I do health content myself. Blue Rasberry (talk) 17:34, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Bluerasberry - Is it acceptable for me to update the IMS Health wikipedia page references from the Jon at IMS account, or will that be seen as more CoI? Also, I was under the assumption based on UseTheCommandLine that if I created a transparent account "Jon from IMS Health" and mention the intended updates in the talk page prior to making edits, that this would mitigate the CoI implications. Is this still true, or no longer true? Should I request that you make updates instead? Any clarification appreciated. Jon from IMS Health (talk) 15:10, 14 October 2013 (UTC)

Jon from IMS Health, sorry, I missed your message. If ping other users with the command {{u|Bluerasberry}} (or whatever name) then they would know about your post if they are not paying attention. Anything that happens to any company article is suspect on Wikipedia and there is no way to guarantee acceptance by the community. Wikipedia is a community project, unlike the private commercial space on the Internet. I saw the book IMS did on Wikipedia so I presume you must know that. My original suggestion still stands. It would be great if IMS would commit significant staff time to contributing to Wikipedia in the spirit of nonprofit grassroots community activism if the organization wishes to have a relationship with a project. In the process of doing that the liaison will come to understand Wikipedia community values. You can request that other users make edits to your company article on the talk page, and Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales does recommend this as his WP:BRIGHTLINE rule. Thanks for your attention. Blue Rasberry (talk) 11:53, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

People for the American Way as a source

@Bluerasberry: Why re-add a WP:SELFPUBLISH source from an advocacy group? Aren't we all about using the highest quality references here? This one seems to be here mainly to inject a moral judgment about the collection of prescribing data, which I would argue violates WP:NPOV rather than supporting it as suggested by your edit summary. While many here may agree with this particular opinion , next time around it may be one you do not look so favorably on. When that happens, I suspect you will not look favorably on citing an editorial on the website of the American Enterprise Institute, the Moral Majority, or the Tea Party website as a source. The issue here from my POV is not the appropriateness of collecting Rx data, but of injecting our own moral and political judgments into the encyclopedia. Formerly 98 (talk) 13:42, 22 November 2014 (UTC)

I saw User:Bluerasberry's edit, and I was surprised by it. That's because I don't recall seeing an argument that a citation is needed to maintain neutrality. I've only considered the principle of WP:NPOV as applying to our content (which I think of as our prose). To check on this, I went to Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view#Bias_in_sources. It states that "Neutral point of view should be achieved by balancing the bias in sources based on the weight of the opinion in reliable sources". In this case I interpret the word "balancing" as only meaning the process of us figuring out what the prose should say. But perhaps that's because of my bias. I haven't analyzed the "See also" links that are part of that section. Best. Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. {{U}}) while signing a reply, thx 18:01, 22 November 2014 (UTC)

Formerly 98 and Biosthmors I put this source here originally so that is part of the reason I put it back. I like adding the perspectives of highly biased advocacy groups and think tanks to Wikipedia because my idea of Wikipedia's WP:NPOV is presenting every bias, and not omitting extremely biased publications. Yes, even mentioning a biased source is injecting a moral judgment into this article as Formerly 98 says, and it is probably true that traditional publications would censor the existence of such extreme viewpoints. In my interpretation of NPOV, when an advocacy group publishes something thoughtful, I feel that brings benefit to Wikipedia just so long as the publisher has established sufficient credibility to meet WP:RS for what they do. Yes, I would like for any opposing advocacy groups to have their say here because when both sides escalate a controversy it brings consensus. I would not want anyone to mistake citations like these for neutral sources.

This particular source is coming from a notable author and a notable organization, each of which have their own Wikipedia article. It seems to me that both this person and the organization represent a point of view which meets WP:RS for the biased source that it is.

Biosthmors is right - it is not the citation that maintains the neutrality, and perhaps this ought to be expanded into a statement about the opposing position, but the citation would be part of that.

Do either of you dispute that this source meets WP:RS? Aside from RS, would you argue that the bias in this source would preclude it from appearing here, and if so, why? Is there something I could do to more clearly label its extreme bias? Blue Rasberry (talk) 20:21, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

from my perspective, we should seek the best secondary sources we can, always, and then write content based on them. The best sources will not present one side, but will present the various key views, fairly. That is why all the policies urge us to use secondary sources - they are written by experts in the field who describe the main viewpoints and what they mean. It is a form of WP:OR for editors to tee up editorial and other primary sources with extreme POVs and write content based on these "duelling sources".... The other thing that is strange here, is that we don't have any or much interpretation of the ruling. The law review article presents the various interpretations pretty fairly, I think. Jytdog (talk) 20:44, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

Jytdog Is there a way to see this biased source as a primary source? Is that what you are suggesting? They seem removed from the source content to me, and seem to be providing a second-party evaluation of the source information. Why is the extreme bias of a self-professed think tank any less of a RS than the bland bias of an organization which purports to be moderate? Are bland think tanks more reliable than highly biased think tanks?

Why do we present multiple biases in things like wars, controversial political topics, and other topics, and what is different here? Blue Rasberry (talk) 21:08, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

i don't understand much of what you write here, lane.... i work on a lot of controversial articles and i always avoid partisan sources. instead i look for the best sources, which by definition provide the mainstream perspective as well as any significant minority views. we are editors, not authors; our job is not to synthesize but rather to express what is in reliable sources. we rely on experts in any given field to provide overviews of controversies, and we paraphrase what they say. that's my view, and i think it reflects the heart of what WP is all about, when you add WP:OR, WP:VERIFY, WP:NPOV, and WP:NOT together. Jytdog (talk) 23:49, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

JytdogI disagree that the best sources are always those that describe all points of view. I feel that one source may be good at describing one point of view and omit others, and still be valid for what it is. I also feel that sometimes it is okay to cite two sources, each of which present opposing positions without acknowledging the other. Do you feel otherwise? What am I failing to understand?

You say "we rely on experts in any given field to provide overviews of controversies, and we paraphrase what they say." Do you feel that People for the American Way is not an expert source for providing the point of view in their field, which Wikipedia says is "modern liberal progressive advocacy"? The author of the paper is Jamie Raskin. Is there anything dubious about his being a WP:RS in the context in which I cited his work? If there were three points of view - left, right, and center - is it your view that only centrist sources meet WP:NPOV, and that whenever possible sources from the left and right should be removed from Wikipedia?

Is the problem that you somehow feel that this organization and person are on the fringe of this topic, and lack standing to comment with expertise?

Is the perspective itself, "modern liberal progressive advocacy", lacking in standing somehow and not worth including in this article?

Do you consider the published content of this organization to somehow be a primary presentation of the data, rather than a secondary interpretation of the facts? Blue Rasberry (talk) 13:17, 26 November 2014 (UTC)

i view the source as WP:PRIMARY for their interpretation. If I were writing a report, I would do WP:OR and go around and find all the different perspectives (review all the WP:PRIMARY sources for interpretation) and juxtapose them, and make it clear where I thought the mainsteam view was and where folks fit on the spectrum. But in my view, as editors, in WP we should find reports like that - WP:SECONDARY sources - and summarize them. Its not for editors to judge themselves what is mainstream or not. That's my view.... Jytdog (talk) 14:25, 27 November 2014 (UTC)

Resolved

Jytdog Okay, I will consider this resolved with an impasse, with the outcome being my leaving that source unused in this article. In my view, the primary source is the facts of the court case, and the secondary sources are interpretations which expert organizations make on those facts. In the source I wanted to use as a citation, I see the organization and author as experts in their field and their interpretation of this case as a secondary source. In my opinion, reports which summarize interpretations of primary data are tertiary sources, and it sounds to me like you want a tertiary source.

I agree that Wikipedians should not judge what is mainstream, but only that they should confirm that sources are secondary and the publishers meet WP:RS. Since you made an assertion that this source is primary, I will yield to your view. Blue Rasberry (talk) 17:50, 28 November 2014 (UTC)