User talk:Fabianfrz

Welcome!

Hello, Fabianfrz, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:

You may also want to complete the Wikipedia Adventure, an interactive tour that will help you learn the basics of editing Wikipedia. You can visit the Teahouse to ask questions or seek help.

Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing 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 for help on your talk page, and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome! Jytdog (talk) 17:33, 3 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Conflict of interest and advocacy in Wikipedia

Hi Fabianfrz. I work on conflict of interest and advocacy issues here in Wikipedia, along with my regular editing,

The real world rivalry between pfSense and OPNsense has spilled over into Wikipedia and has disrupted this project, leading to extended discussions in several places in WP.

You have made only two contributions but they are both in the field of this rivalry. I'm giving you notice of our Conflict of Interest guideline and Terms of Use, and will have some comments and requests for you below.

Hello, Fabianfrz. 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. Editing for the purpose of advertising or promotion is not permitted. See the conflict of interest 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 (see 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 for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation (see WP:PAID).

Also please note that editing for the purpose of advertising, publicising, or promoting anyone or anything is not permitted. Thank you.

Comments and requests

Wikipedia is a widely-used reference work and managing conflict of interest and advocacy is essential for ensuring the integrity of Wikipedia and retaining the public's trust in it.

With regard to conflicts of interest, as in academia, COI is managed here in two steps - disclosure and a form of peer review. Please note that there is no bar to being part of the Wikipedia community if you want to be involved in articles where you have a conflict of interest; there are just some things we ask you to do (and if you are paid, some things you need to do).

Disclosure is the most important, and first, step. While I am not asking you to disclose your identity (anonymity is strictly protecting by our WP:OUTING policy) would you please disclose if you have some connection with the companies and developer communities for pfSense and OPNsense, directly or through a third party? You can answer how ever you wish (giving personally identifying information or not), but if there is a connection, please disclose it. After you respond (and you can just reply below), I can walk you through how the "peer review" part happens and then, if you like, I can provide you with some more general orientation as to how this place works. Please reply here, just below, to keep the discussion in one place. Thanks! Jytdog (talk) 18:00, 3 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

For the question for Jytdog: I an not paid by anyone for my edits nor has anybody asked me to do them. I am a contributor of the project in my free time so I won't change the article by myself (should be done by a neutral person). This is my GitHub account if it helps: fabianfrz. I am not part of Deciso but a user of OPNsense who extends it from time to time by writing plugins and sometimes doing bug fixes.

The relationship between me and the core developers is some communication via email and pull requests and tickets on GitHub. We have never met in real life. I hope that helps to clarify your question.--Fabianfrz (talk) 19:04, 3 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for replying! Quick note on the logistics of discussing things on Talk pages, which are essential for everything that happens here. In Talk page discussions, we "thread" comments by indenting - when you reply to someone, you put a colon in front of your comment, which the Wikipedia software will render into an indent when you save your edit; if the other person has indented once, then you indent twice by putting two colons in front of your comment, which the WP software converts into two indents, and when that gets ridiculous you reset back to the margin (or "outdent") by putting this {{od}} in front of your comment. This also allows you to make it clear if you are also responding to something that someone else responded to if there are more than two people in the discussion; in that case you would indent the same amount as the person just above you in the thread. I hope that all makes sense. And at the end of the comment, please "sign" by typing exactly four (not 3 or 5) tildas "~~~~" which the WP software converts into a date stamp and links to your talk and user pages when you save your edit. That is how we know who said what. I know this is insanely archaic and unwieldy, but this is the software environment we have to work on. Sorry about that.

In this edit I removed the new section you made, and indented this, to make it a normally formatted reply. I will reply on the substance in a second... Jytdog (talk) 19:22, 3 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks very much for replying and disclosing your connections. This is a difficult situation on the borderline between COI and advocacy (eg "fans" and "haters"). I wrote about this some at the WP:COIN thread about OPNsense/PfSense here.

All that the community can ask, is that you check your passion for OPNsense at the login page, and keep in mind that you are very likely biased with respect to OPNsense and pfsense.

I wrote a little thing to help get people oriented to the mission and the policies and guidelines through which the Wikipedia community tries to realize the mission. It is at user:Jytdog/How. If you have some time I hope you can make time to read it and think about it a it.

While you are of course free to edit about whatever the heck you want, please do consider broadening the scope of your editing. (I do realize that you are just getting started here, and everybody starts somewhere! Who knows where you will end up). I suggest that you edit about other stuff while we work out the issues around these two products. Please try to use only high quality, independent sources (avoid company websites, press releases, and blogs), and concentrate on adding high level accepted knowledge to WP aimed at the general public -- stuff people can learn from, not "news" and not super-detailed product information. If you know a lot of about firewalls and networking maybe you can improve our coverage of those topics. Very often articles get warped by tons of detail being added to some tiny aspect while there is some big hole or very undeveloped sections about important stuff. Experts can be very helpful in evening out content, filling gaps and trimming back excessive detail. Please consider doing that.

But do try to aim everything you do and write in Wikipedia to further Wikipedia's mission to provide the public with accepted knowledge (not product brochures) and base everything you do on the spirit (not just the letter) of the content and behavior policies and guidelines. Your passions will determine what you work on, but they shouldn't guide how you work here. I hope that makes sense.

If you have questions about working in WP at any time going forward, or about anything I wrote above, please ask me. I am happy to talk. Thanks again for your patience with me. Jytdog (talk) 19:29, 3 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]