On Fri, Jan 3, 2014 at 4:44 PM, Animalgatekeeper <david.cowdrey@rspca.org.uk> wrote:
Hi,

I am the Head of Comms at RSPCA and the page has been vandalised by supporters of the Countryside Alliance. I am trying to delete the comments section.  Can you tell me the best way to do this?

all the best

David

--
This email was sent by user "Animalgatekeeper" on the English Wikipedia to user "Twsx". It has been automatically delivered and the Wikimedia Foundation cannot be held responsible for its contents.

The sender has not been given the recipient's email address, nor any information about his/her email account; and the recipient has no obligation to reply to this email or take any other action that might disclose his/her identity. If you respond, the sender will know your email address. For further information on privacy, security, and replying, as well as abuse and removal from emailing, see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Email>.







Dear David.

--- PLEASE NOTE:
I am writing this due to a message I received on Wikipedia from a user claiming to be you.
If you did not send this message, and you were not editing the RSPCA article on Wikipedia today, Friday, please discard this message, as in that case, this is a simple and unimportant case of impersonation from a vandal on Wikipedia.
If, however, you indeed did send me this message, please read on.
---


The correct course of action would have been to take part in the conversation, whereas this way, the conversation only consisted of warning messages for your user account. Ignoring these was what lead to the constant reversal of your edits and the temporary ban issued to your Wikipedia user account.
However, Wikipedia policy can be hard to grasp sometimes, especially for new users, so I'll try to give you a quick rundown of this situation to the best of my knowledge.

Removing content from Wikipedia pages without any explanation is considered to be vandalism – that's what caused all the ruckus. Now, usually I would recommend that you remove the content and give a clear explanation of the action in the edit summary (the field for which you can find at the bottom of the page content when editing a page).

However, in your case, this presents a clear conflict of interest which is a strong pillar of Wikipedia editing policy. You can read more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest

What I would recommend you do is make a so called "Edit request". In the case of a conflict of interest, this would mean starting a new section on the article's talk page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Royal_Society_for_the_Prevention_of_Cruelty_to_Animals), and describing in detail which parts of the article you think should be removed, and more importantly, why you feel they should be removed. Make sure to put the template "{{request edit}}" before your explanation. You can read more about the process here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_requests#Making_requests

I recommend you don't just go ahead and start removing content again, as it would probably just restart the whole ordeal.

If you have any questions, you can of course contact me here via e-mail, or on my Wikipedia talkpage, which would be good as I could then ask a more experience editor/administrator to chip in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Twsx
Your account on Wikipedia was blocked for 31 hours, so you should be able to start communicating on Wikipedia again starting on Sunday.

Kind regards,
Flo


Florian Sidler
Birkenstrasse 1
CH-8716 Schmerikon
Mobile: 079 237 20 69
E-Mail: fsidler@gmail.com







On Fri, Jan 3, 2014 at 10:28 PM, David Cowdrey <david.cowdrey@rspca.org.uk> wrote:
Hi Flo,

It was me and yes I was new so do forgive my poor grasp of Wikipedia etiquette.

I really appreciate your help and will follow your advice. Our page has been hijacked by another organisation who is anti RSPCA and have added negative content and false information.

Thank you and sorry about not being able to follow the talk process.

All the best

David