User talk:Netfitch

Welcome!

Hello, Netfitch, 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:

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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) 19:10, 29 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

ANI Nov 2017

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. --Mr.hmm (talk) 13:30, 29 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Conflict of interest and advocacy in Wikipedia

This is a followup to my comment at WP:COIN about OPNsense/PfSense here.

I work on conflict of interest issues here in Wikipedia, along with my regular editing. Your recent edits are promotional with regard to Deciso and its product, OPNsense. 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.

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 is essential for ensuring the integrity of Wikipedia and retaining the public's trust in it. 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 Deciso or the developer community for OPNsense, directly or through a third party (e.g. a PR agency or the like)? 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. Jytdog (talk) 19:11, 29 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

My contributions are from 2015 and to acknowledge your stated guidelines I have no intention of editing page content ever again. I will disclose that I am part of the OPNsense developer community as an unpaid volunteer with a different employer who has no stake in OPNsense, FreeBSD or firewalls. I will, however, respond to mentions and misinformation to state the fact that I disagree with the views of others, who negatively impact the perception of OPNsense here or elsewhere. I hope I have never offended in the past and only reacted appropriately in such cases to provide a fair level of context in what I believe are lopsided arguments. If not, please let me know. Netfitch (talk) 09:10, 30 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your reply! To be clear, you did participate in the very recent round of disruption, which is what led me to come to your page here.

I very much understand everybody's frustration and I am starting to understand the roots of it. I don't know if you have noticed but I am working on both the PfSense and the OPNsense pages to try to bring them in line with community policies and guidelines.

Thanks for disclosing that you are a volunteer developer for OPNsense.

This sort of thing is on the borderline between conflict of interest and advocacy -- you are clearly passionate about the project.... so where does that cross the line into an actual conflict of interest? Too hard to say.

I do want to make sure are aware of issues with advocacy in Wikipedia.

There are a lot of things that Wikipedia is not (see What Wikipedia is not) and one of the things WP is not, is a platform for advocacy. Please especially see the section, WP:NOTADVOCACY. "What Wikipedia is Not" really describes our mission - something very essential to the very guts of this place. People come edit for many reasons, but one of the main ones is that they are passionate about something. That passion is a double-edged sword. It drives people to contribute which has the potential for productive construction, but it can also lead people to abuse Wikipedia - to hijack it from its mission of providing the world with free access to "accepted knowledge." Some people come here and try to create promotional content about their companies (classic "COI"), some come to tell everybody how bad it is to eat meat, some come to grind various political axes... we get all kinds of advocacy (COI is just a subset of it) It all comes down to violations of NOTADVOCACY. A lot of times, people don't even understand this is not OK. I try to talk with folks, to make sure they are aware of these issues.

For non-COI advocacy issues, we have three very good essays offering advice - one is WP:ADVOCACY another is WP:SPA, and see also WP:TENDENTIOUS which describes how advocacy editors tend to behave.

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.

Please do try to check your passion for OPNsense at the login page. And while you are 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 (not your mission) 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.

But it would be great if you steered clear of the hotspots until we can get both articles into reasonable shape, and please do consider editing more broadly.

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) 03:14, 1 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]