Alweth

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Hello, Alweth, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions to this free encyclopedia. If you decide that you need help, check out Getting Help below, ask at the help desk, or place {{Help me}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking or by typing four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your username and the date. Also, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field. Below are some useful links to facilitate your involvement. Happy editing! Robert McClenon (talk) 01:33, 15 February 2019 (UTC) Getting started Introduction Contributing to Wikipedia The five pillars of Wikipedia How to edit a page Intuitive guide to Wikipedia Finding your way around Table of contents Directories and indexes Department directory Editing articles How to develop an article Simplified Manual of Style Getting help Frequently asked questions Cheatsheet Our new user help forum, the Teahouse The Help Desk, for more advanced questions Help pages Article Wizard – a Wizard to help you create articles How you can help Community Portal Join a WikiProject Follow Wikipedia etiquette Practice civility Discover what's going on in the Wikimedia community

Young Living

It's a bit odd for someone to return from a five year hiatus to do battle for a borderline fraudulent company. Are you a distributor or something? Guy (Help!) 10:26, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

@Guy, thanks for asking. No, I am not a distributor. Nobody close to me is a distributor. I've never even purchased essential oils or any Young Living product. I have some casual friends that I believe are distributors based on the fact that they keep talking about how good essential oils are on social media. I would even describe myself as a mild essential oils skeptic.

My editing of Wikipedia has generally been based on my encounters with articles as a reader and, as you see from my contribution history, has always been only every now and then, and usually very conservative. I've probably made edits in the intervening 5 years, not realizing or caring that I wasn't logged in. When I made my first edit to the Young Living article I wasn't even logged in and didn't realize it until after I had commented on the talk page and signed it and saw that it was signed as an IP address.

I never intended to get embroiled in a battle. I saw an article that was simply a list of negative things about the company. That tends to be a warning sign to me that there's some agenda-based editing going on. I checked the Talk page to see that there was a discussion going about that very topic. I thought User:CircularReason and User:Rhode Island Red had made valid points on both sides. After reviewing some of the source articles, I made an edit that I thought did a fine job of taking concerns from both sides into consideration, the aforementioned first edit. I was surprised when I saw that my edit had been promptly reverted.

Even if we implemented all the changes User:Bilby or I have suggested, I would still say the article is more negative than the secondary sources in general. I think the fact that the company is borderline fraudulent is reflected enough in an accurate representation of the secondary sources and doesn't need to be doubled-down on in the article.

The main thing that keeps me coming back is that I believe many of the proposed edits are reasonable and do a good job of taking Rhode Island Red's valid points into consideration and I'd hate to see aggressive reverting, wikilawyering, specious arguments, exhaustive arguing, and unwllingness to compromise prevent the article from getting better. It's more of a principle thing, which I think you'll see is what has gotten me into arguments in the past: 1, 2.

It's inevitable that any accurate article on an MLM will be more negative than the wider spread of sources, because vast swathes of content now is churnalism. Our job is to get tot he core of what a subject is. In this case, it's quackery. Guy (Help!) 17:17, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

I'm not talking about the wider swath of material. I'm talking about the very material that's being cited to portray Young Living negatively, eg. The New Yorker piece. Even those sources are being selectively quoted to make Young Living sound worse than it sounds in the sources itself. Alweth (talk) 15:35, 19 February 2019 (UTC)