Talk:Jonathan R. Alger

This edit request by an editor with a conflict of interest has now been answered.

My name is Caitlyn Read and I work for James Madison University in the Office of Communications and Marketing. Our office serves as James Madison University's primary communications link to the world beyond campus, and we’re responsible for all university communications, marketing and public affairs efforts. While we do not intend to directly edit Wikipedia entries related to our university, we are happy to act as a resource for the editing community by providing factual, non-advertorial information and accompanying third-party citations.

While making content suggestions to this page, I will be strictly adhering to Wikipedia requirements that the entry be neutral, free of marketing and advertorial content, and have third-party citations needed for verification of all information added to the entry. I welcome any input, edits, and feedback from the Wikipedia community.

Overview: I am suggesting the correction of existing information and offering information to expand this stub.

Suggested updates to existing information include:

• Information about the Board of Directors of the National Association of College and University Attorneys and the advisory board for the Association of American Universities is outdated. His terms of service have ended and cited links were dead.
• The article says “In 2014 Alger was criticized for JMU's handling of a case,” but sources for that statement are problematic. The first source cited^[1] is an editorial opinion piece written by an invested party and the second source cited^[2] does not criticize the President for his role at any point. Please consider these sources^[3][4]on the same subject.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Cville24 (talk • contribs) 17:36, 11 November 2014

Comment: I think you need to be really careful here. Since you've admitted you're a COI editor, removing or replacing any of existing sources yourself might be seen as an attempt to exert some type of editorial control over the article. Per Wikipedia's Law of Unintended Consequences, If you write about yourself, your group or your company, once the article is created, you have no right to control its content, or to delete it outside the normal channels. Content is irrevocably added with every edit. If there is anything publicly available on a topic that you would not want to have included in an article, it will probably find its way there eventually. I know you didn't create the article, but I still think you need to be careful. The opinions expressed in those particular sources may not be favorable towards Alger, and you could try and argue WP:UNDUE, but replacing two critical sources with two "more favorable" sources given your COI status is probably going to seem suspicious to other editors. I'm not saying you're wrong here, but if I were you (even without the COI) I would probably ask for advice at WP:RSN, or WP:BLPN and see what others think before removing or replacing any of these myself. Just a suggestion. - Marchjuly (talk) 05:52, 18 November 2014 (UTC)

Marchjuly First, thanks so much for all your help with this article. Agree, this is risky and I'm not planning on editing this section of the article at all myself (including removing or replacing sources). I'll post to WP:RSN to see what they have to say. Cville24 (talk) 14:43, 18 November 2014 (UTC)

@Cville24 I disagree with your characterization. If op-eds are being used for contentious material about a BLP, we should absolutely not discourage that person or their affiliates from bringing it up. Rather such issues should be corrected promptly with all due apologies that the article-subject was so unfairly represented. Wikipedia is crowd-sourced, what can you do? The controversy section is overtly excessive and appears to have only a marginal amount of relevance to the article-subject. When I first started reading it, I was expecting it to be Jonathan that did the sexual assaulting, but it appears the only connection is that he was a part of the administration that was widely reported to have under-responded to the incident. CorporateM (Talk) 07:06, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

 Done and watchlisted. Please note WP:BLP requires that we remove poorly-sourced contentious material about living people "immediately and without discussion". Op-eds and sources that do not mention the subject of the article fall under this parameter. I have provided detailed notes in my edit-summaries to explain each trim and ended up eliminating almost the entire section, which was scraped together with primary sources, op-eds, and sources that weren't about Jonathan. CorporateM (Talk) 07:16, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

Jonathan R. Alger is the sixth and current president of James Madison University. Alger became JMU's sixth president on July 1, 2012.^[1][2]Alger is the sixth president since the university’s founding in 1908. He was formally inaugurated on March 15, 2013.^[3]

Alger is also a scholar and speaker on higher education policy and law^[4] and currently co-teaches a seminar on leadership in the JMU Honors Program.^[5][6]

I have removed the embedded links being used as citation per WP:CS#Avoid embedded links. Normally, I would try to change these into inline citations whenever possible, but the three links that were embedded are already cited as sources and I don't think they need to re-added. - Marchjuly (talk) 04:05, 18 November 2014 (UTC)

Have also removed {{external links}} per above. - Marchjuly (talk) 04:10, 18 November 2014 (UTC)

I edited the date formats for all of the WP:CT#citation template "accessdate" and "date" parameters so that they are consistent with the format chosen in this edit per WP:CITEVAR. I also believe per MOS:DATETIES that since this is an article about an American educator who is the president of an American university, the date format "Day Month Year" should probably not be used and either a US-style date format or an all numerical format used instead. - Marchjuly (talk) 04:35, 18 November 2014 (UTC)

Please note I have declared my COI above and added impartial content to this article that has been reviewed by multiple editors and OK'd. I have not edited the Sexual Assault Controversy section as I don't feel it appropriate given my COI. If someone could please review the currently cited sources for impartiality, I would appreciate it. See thread above "Explanation of Suggestions" for more info. Thanks, all. Cville24 (talk) 15:05, 18 November 2014 (UTC)

I rewrote and expanded the Sexual Assault Controversy section myself, because this is a BLP with some problems in the sourcing, and needs to be expedited. The student handbook page has changed since it was cited and it seems that the 2013 version was never archived. So I linked to the changes in the new handbook, with the new policy. The president's role appears to be unchanged. I archived that, and am going to archive the new cites to the TV station's coverage, which I thought was good. So those will be there in case the links go dead. I hope this version is impartial enough to be acceptable all around. – Margin1522 (talk) 21:02, 18 November 2014 (UTC)