User talk:Tigerfair

Hello, Tigerfair, and welcome to Wikipedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, please see our help pages, and if you can't find what you are looking for there, please feel free to ask me on my talk page or place {{Help me}} on this page and someone will drop by to help. Red Director (talk) 22:24, 15 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Managing a conflict of interest

Hello, Tigerfair. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places or things you have written about on the page DISC assessment, you may have a conflict of interest (COI). Editors with a conflict of interest may be unduly influenced by their connection to the topic. 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, colleagues, company, organization or competitors;
propose changes on the talk pages of affected articles (you can use the {{request edit}} template);
disclose your conflict of interest when discussing affected articles (see Wikipedia:Conflict of interest#How to disclose a COI);
avoid linking to your organization's website in other articles (see Wikipedia:Spam#External link spamming);
do your best to comply with Wikipedia's content policies.

In addition, you are required by the Wikimedia Foundation's terms of use to 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 Wikipedia:Paid-contribution disclosure.

Also, editing for the purpose of advertising, publicising, or promoting anyone or anything is not permitted. I notice that you have only edited pages related to this subject. Could you kindly say what connection if any you might have to this subject? Salimfadhley (talk) 10:09, 13 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Salimfadhley: Hello. Thank you for reaching out. I do not have a conflict of interest. I do not work for any organization who creates or distributes DISC assessments (I do not work for any organization at all, currently). I have been invested in this page because I undertook a research effort aiming to prove or disprove DISC assessments and I wanted to let my findings reach a broader audience, therefore I intended to put some of my findings on Wikipedia. I was dismayed by the lack of scholarly sources on this page; and the overall tone which seemed like a battleground for DISC supporters v. skeptics. I am not a supporter (there are various negatives to DISC assessments that I am planning on including, not including but not limited to failed validation attempts on ipsative and adaptive style type assessments (This was on the page before but someone deleted this section) as well as DISC not being a good predictor of job performance or organizational committment) but based on my research findings I do know there is some validity and usefulness to DISC assessments. I have read over 25+ published academic papers relating to DISC so I am planning on condensing my findings and placing it on Wikipedia so that interested users can learn more information. I am aware that some of the reference links I use link reports on one DISC assessment but this is necessary- as this was the only assessment that includes research stats about its validity. It is necessary for context- it would be like a wiki article on a plane linking to its scematics, yes, it would probably be from a company manufacturing planes but it is useful to the audience of the article. I will try to minimize its use as much as possible but its use is occasionally necessary as it is the sole source of some of the information concerning the research behind its reliability and validity. I did not want to include DISC assessments that are not valid in the reliability section (there are many non-valid assessments- the 1970s original, disc classic (90s), even the 2008 previous version of the 2013, and all current ipsative or adaptive style assessments) My aim in the edits for this page is to provide as much information as possible backed by academic findings. I have removed sections based on opinion articles that do not have research backings, which I feel is a step in the right direction. I hope you understand the direction of the page. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Tigerfair (talk) 16:03, 13 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for explaining your situation. Please don't use Wikipedia to publish original research (if that's what you are intending to do). I think there's a grave danger of misrepresenting something that most mainstream sources regard as pseudoscience is if it were mostly valid science. There's also a danger of using unreliable sources, for example sources with a close connection to one of the vendors of this assessment. It would be better to have a smaller article free from these major defects than a bigger, more detailed article which has the potential to mislead. --Salimfadhley (talk) 16:09, 13 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Can I also suggest that you edit other topics? Your edit history shows that you have only edited a single subject, which might cause people to believe that you have some kind of commercial interest in it. Editing other topics will allow you to learn our standards and become a better editor. --Salimfadhley (talk) 16:10, 13 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Salimfadhley: Thank you. No, it is not original research. I undertook a literature review. As for misrepresenting the topic, I have taken the time to read all of the reference sources that are/have been used in this page to prove the claim that DISC is psuedoscience. Most if not all articles are not scholarly sources but are opinion pieces/opinion articles. I have not seen the use of actual measured statistics/data showing that the DISC assessment has failed validation attempts or has fallen below statistical standards for reliability (there are some and I would like to see these included, provided it is specific as to which assessment it is validating). I would welcome the inclusion of this data/research in the page if you can find good sources for it. I have tried to include sources that provide statistics where possible. As for the pseudoscience aspect, there is room for mention in this page but wherever I have seen it used in this page the language was phrased in a biased way. The language should be phrased in a more objective/neutral way; I would cite the Myers-Brigg Wikipedia page as an example of this and this page should adopt some of the phrasing from that page. (e.g "it has been criticized as pseudoscience[5] and is not widely endorsed by academic researchers in the field." exact language from the page). Again I am aware that the 2013 report is connected to the vendor. However it is published research that provides the statistics confirming validation/reliability for a DISC assessment. This is vital context to the page and I do not think it can be omitted. I phrased it carefully to take away mention of the assessment's name, but I did have to add "normative" in front of it to be clear that the research only validates the specific assessment and not all assessments. It is hard to discuss assessments without using occasional references to vendor websites as they contain the most information on the assessments. I would like to close by saying using published statistics/data is the best way to make sure an article does not mislead. Using biased language and sourcing from opinion pieces skews the focus of the page away from objectively reporting facts about the topic and instead including opinions about it. I would also like to ask what your opinion on DISC assessments are. I can disclose my opinion- after reading numerous research findings, most DISC assessments are not valid, however some have been proven reliable/valid. The assessments have not been shown to correlate with job performance but have been found to correlate to success in SOME aspects of job tasks. They are mostly useful in a group setting with certain balances of types correlating to team success. If editors of this page hold a firm negative opinion without grounding in knowledge of academic findings involving this topic than this violates Wikipedia's neutrality policy. There is definitely room for criticism and negative views on this topic (hence why there is a whole Criticism section in the page) but it should not bleed over into other sections that should be neutral, and statistics should not be deleted. Tigerfair (talk) 18:52, 13 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

First of all, please use paragraphs. It makes your response easier to read than a big block of text.

Please familiarise yourself with WP:MEDRS which describes the kinds of sources we can sue for biomedical topics.

No, I don't think using stats is the correct way forwards. We certainly should not be using unpublished anything as a basis for this article. We base Wikipedia articles on secondary sources. The kind of research you are looking at would almost certainly be primary research, and any conclusion you may have drawn from reading it would be your own original research. That's something that we are not entitled to do as Wikipedia Editors.

What matters is what the secondary sources say about this subject. Do we have reliable publications that have weighed in on the scientific validity of the DISC assessment? It doesn't matter what I personally think of it. Salimfadhley (talk) 19:48, 13 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]