Hello DavidB4. The nature of your edits gives the impression you have an undisclosed financial stake in promoting a topic, and that you have not complied with Wikipedia's mandatory paid editing disclosure requirements. Paid advocacy is a category of conflict of interest (COI) editing that involves being compensated by a person, group, company or organization to use Wikipedia to promote their interests. Undisclosed paid advocacy is prohibited by our policies on neutral point of view and what Wikipedia is not, and is an especially egregious type of COI; the Wikimedia Foundation regards it as a "black hat" practice akin to Black hat SEO.
Paid advocates are very strongly discouraged from direct article editing, and should instead propose changes on the talk page of the article in question if an article exists, and if it does not, from attempting to write an article at all. At best, any proposed article creation should be submitted through the articles for creation process, rather than directly.
Regardless, if you are receiving or expect to receive compensation for your edits, broadly construed, you are required by the
Wikimedia Terms of Use to disclose your employer, client and affiliation. You can post such a mandatory disclosure to your user page at
User:DavidB4. The template {{
Paid}} can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form: {{paid|user=DavidB4|employer=InsertName|client=InsertName}}. If I am mistaken – you are not being directly or indirectly compensated for your edits – please state that in response to this message. Otherwise, please provide the required disclosure. In either case, please do not edit further until you answer this message. --
Hammersoft (
talk) 04:42, 2 December 2017 (UTC)
Hello, yes you are correct and I apologize for my error. I would like to comply fully with the requirements but am unsure how to fill out the disclosure doc you mentioned can you assist me at all? Best regards, David DavidB4 ( talk) 08:15, 2 December 2017 (UTC)
.
- Hello David, and thanks for replying. The instructions on how to do it are above; the part that starts "{{paid". Insert your employer name where it asks, and the client name if appropriate. You should place this on your userpage. Please be aware that even if you make this declaration as required, that editing on behalf of your employer or a client is strongly discouraged. Continuing to edit on behalf of your employer/client in the ways that you have been is very likely to lead to the edits being undone, and quite possibly lead to a loss of editing privileges. You could still make suggestions for changes to articles by way of their respective talk pages. Understand; Wikipedia is an open project. Anyone can edit it. If we permitted paid editing by people or people editing on behalf of companies/clients, Wikipedia would be absolutely overwhelmed with advertisements. Imagine instead of a green field of grass we would instead have Times Square. We just can't permit it. We're an educational resource, not an advertising platform. I hope this makes sense. If you need further assistance, let me know. Or, alternatively, place the {{ help me}} template here on your talk page followed by your question, and someone will be along shortly to help you. All the best, -- Hammersoft ( talk) 14:14, 2 December 2017 (UTC)