Talk:Aglow International

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[edit] POV-check

My major concern is that the article was written by an account named after the organization the article is about. Also, a lot of the sourcing seems to be from the organization's own website. That the article contains a section on criticism of the organization is not enough to alleviate the concerns raised by those two red flags, and someone more familiar with the subject matter than I am should vet the article for compliance with WP:NPOV. --Dynaflow babble 00:45, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Question about POV

Hello,

Would minimizing the references to Aglow's web site help in making this article more neutral? I have tried to only include references to the web site when what I considered to be important information was not available in other public sources. I think the only times I have referred to the web site were when detailing statistics, mission statement, the general structure of the organization, and direct quotations from an article written by the president of the organization.

I am brand new to Wikipedia and have honestly tried to write as unbiased an article as possible. I am sorry that it came across as biased - I keep rereading it and trying to make edits that will help. However, the honest truth is that although this is a worldwide organization, it has not been reported upon widely in the media, and so I don't have a lot of external sources to draw upon. I wanted to paint as complete a picture as I could though and therefore had to resort to the website. I would really hate to see the article get deleted because of a lack on my part, and would appreciate any help that anyone has to offer.

I am also working on adding the wiki links within the article - it's a lot more work than I thought!

Thanks to all who have taken the time to read the article and comment.

Aglowinternational 00:01, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Hi. The major reason this article is attracting negative attention is that you are obviously affiliated with the organization in question, as indicated by your username. Wikipedia gets a mind-bending amount of spam, and it's necessary for us to be rather cut-throat in our efforts to keep the spammers at bay. The article initially attracted my attention about ten or twenty seconds after you created it because your username matched the article title, and, per precedent, that sets off my personal SPAMDAR. You apparently set off someone else's SPAMDAR too [1], but a third editor [2] concurred with me that the article should not be summarily deleted. Despite the obvious concern with WP:COI causing problems that could lead to a breaching of Wikipedia's WP:NPOV policy, this article is prima facie not spam.

Your username will continue to cause you problems because, per WP:U, Wikipedia does not allow group user accounts or accounts named after groups. You should register a personal account of your own. After you have done that, I will put the Aglowinternational account up for non-prejudicial blocking at WP:UAA so that a sysop can take it out of circulation. If you wish to do so, you can put a link to your former account on your new userpage using {{userlinks|Aglowinternational}}, which will display as Aglowinternational (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · block user · block log) and keep any potential conflict of interest issues above-board and keep you from running afoul of the ever-popular allegations of sock-puppetry that seem to get thrown around with regularity on contentious articles.

I will be back at some point later on to respond to any additional questions you may have, but in the meantime, you may want to contact a neutral third party to look at the article and vet it for content-neutrality. Try sending an e-mail to Prof. Griffith at Princeton [3], whose book you cite. This seems to fall into her area of expertise, and she or one of her grad students might be willing to make at least a cursory run through the article to check for any glaring errors or omissions, and then make changes and/or leave their assessment here on the Talk page. That will help alleviate many of the concerns that have been expressed over this article. --Dynaflow babble 01:39, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Following Through

Hi,

I took your suggestion and created a new user account and linked to the old one from my userpage (I hope I did it right). Should I resubmit the article through this new account and delete the old one? I also contacted Prof. Griffith as you suggested and hopefully she will be able to read through the article.

Thank you so much for your help!

Minna812 17:02, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

There's no need for resubmission; articles can't be deleted except through administrative action anyway, and this version has already built up a multiple-user history [4].

On an article-content-related note, I noticed that you're doing most of your references in a way that's harder than necessary. It's possible on Wikipedia to easily make in-line citations into within-page links. See WP:CITE#How to cite sources. --Dynaflow babble 17:39, 23 May 2007 (UTC)