Missiopedia:Autobiography
From Missiopedia
| This page is considered a guideline on Missiopedia. It is generally accepted among editors and is considered a standard that all users should follow. However, it is not set in stone and should be treated with common sense and the occasional exception. When editing this page, please ensure that your revision reflects consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page. |
| Missiopedia Guidelines |
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| Content |
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Autobiography |
| Classification |
| Editing |
| Discussion |
| Behavior |
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Etiquette |
| Style |
| Manual of style
See also policies |
You should wait for others to write an article about subjects in which you are personally involved. This applies to articles about you, your achievements, your business, your publications, your website, your relatives, and any other possible conflict of interest.
Other web-baed encyclopedias have gone through many prolonged disputes about the significance, factual accuracy, and neutrality of such articles. Refraining from such editing is therefore important in maintaining Missiopedia's neutral stance and in avoiding the appearance of POV-pushing. This does not mean, however, that it is impossible to write a neutral, verifiable autobiography, or that they are strictly forbidden. It is just that people tend to promote themselves, either clearly (like saying "I'm great") or more subtly (like not including important, verifiable negative incidents in their lives, or adding lots of unsourced positive incidents, or giving the negative incidents too little weight). Because of this, writing autobiographies is highly discouraged. If one wants to write an autobiography it is advisable to discuss it with the community and seek consensus first.
If you have published elsewhere on a subject, we welcome you to contribute to articles on the subject for Missiopedia. However, every Missiopedia article is expected to cover its subject in a neutral, fair, and comprehensive way in order to advance knowledge of the subject as a whole. Articles that exist primarily to advance the contributor will likely be deleted.
[edit] If Missiopedia already has an article about you
It is difficult to write neutrally about yourself. Therefore, it is considered proper on Missiopedia to let others do the writing. Instead, contribute material or make suggestions on the article's talk page and let independent editors write it into the article itself.
However, in clear-cut cases, it is permissible to edit pages connected to yourself. So, you can revert vandalism; but of course it has to be simple, obvious vandalism, and not just a content dispute. Similarly, you should feel free to correct mistaken or out-of-date facts about yourself, such as marital status, current employer, place of birth, and so on. However, be prepared that if the fact has different interpretations, others will edit it.
Since Missiopedia is an encyclopedia, it should be a secondary or tertiary source. This means that Missiopedia should not contain any "new" information or theories (see Missiopedia:No original research) and all information should have checkable third-party references. Facts, retellings of events, and clarifications which you may wish to have added to an article about yourself must be verifiable.
Missiopedia does not wish to have an inaccurate article about you. Our Neutral point of view policy means we aim to have a balanced and fair article. Our goal is not to offer opinions of our own, but only to accurately reproduce those of others, which should be sourced and cited. You can help by pointing us to sources which can enable a more balanced view to be presented.
If you don't like the photo, you can help Missiopedia by contributing a good photo under a suitable free content license.
It would probably be a good idea to identify yourself on the article's talk page with the Template:Tl notice.
[edit] Creating an article about yourself
Creating an article about yourself is strongly discouraged. If you create such an article, it might be listed on articles for deletion. Deletion is not certain, but many feel strongly that you should not start articles about yourself. This is because independent creation encourages independent validation of both significance and verifiability. All edits to articles must conform to Missiopedia:No original research, Missiopedia:Neutral point of view, and Missiopedia:Verifiability.
If you are not "notable" under Missiopedia guidelines, creating an article about yourself may violate the policy that Missiopedia is not a personal webspace provider and would thus qualify for speedy deletion. If your achievements, etc., are verifiable and genuinely notable, and thus suitable for inclusion in Missiopedia, someone else will probably create an article about you sooner or later. (See Missiopedia:Missiopedians with articles.)
Note that anything you submit can be edited by others. Several autobiographical articles have been a source of dismay to their original authors after a period of editing by the community, and in at least four instances have been listed for deletion by their original authors. In some cases the article is kept even if the original author requests otherwise. People are generally unable to determine whether they are themselves encyclopedic.
One thing which you can do to assist other Missiopedia editors is, if you already maintain a personal website, please ensure that any information that you want in your Missiopedia article is already on your own website. As long as it's not involving grandiose claims like, "I was the first to create this widget," or "My book was the biggest seller that year," a personal website can be used as a reference for general biographical information. As the Missiopedia Verifiability policy states: Self-published sources and other published sources of dubious reliability may be used as sources in articles about themselves . . . so long as the information is notable, not unduly self-aggrandizing, and not contradicted by other published sources.
