From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

July 2021

Information icon

Hello WWAadvertising. The nature of your edits gives the impression you have an undisclosed financial stake in promoting a topic, but 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 serious type of COI; the Wikimedia Foundation regards it as a "black hat" practice akin to black-hat search-engine optimization.

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. If the article does not exist, paid advocates are extremely strongly discouraged 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:WWAadvertising. The template {{ Paid}} can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form: {{paid|user=WWAadvertising|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, do not edit further until you answer this message. ScottishFinnishRadish ( talk) 19:53, 6 July 2021 (UTC) reply

Your account has been blocked from editing Wikipedia because your username, WWAadvertising, does not meet our username policy. Your username is the principal reason for the block. You are welcome to continue editing after you have selected a new username that meets the username policy guidelines, which are summarized below.
Per the username policy, a username should represent an individual and should not: represent a group or organization; be promotional; be misleading (such as indicating possession of special user rights or being a "Bot" account (unless approved for such purposes)); be offensive or otherwise disruptive. However, a username that contains the name of a organization and also identifies you individually, such as "Sara Smith at XYZ Company", "Mark at WidgetsUSA", or "FoobarFan87" is allowed, though, among others, the guidance on conflict of interest and the policy of paid-contribution disclosure are relevant.
You are encouraged to choose a new account name that meets our username policy guidelines and create the account yourself. Alternatively, if you wish for your existing contributions to carry over under a new name, then you may request a change in username by:
  1. Adding {{ unblock-un|your new username here}} below. You should be able to do this even though you are blocked. If not, you may wish to contact the blocking administrator by clicking on "Email this user" from their talk page.
  2. At an administrator's discretion, you may be unblocked for 24 hours to file a change of name request.
  3. Your requested new username cannot already be in use. Therefore, please check the list here to see if a name is taken prior to requesting a change of name.
Appeals: If, after reading the guide to appealing blocks you believe you were blocked in error, then you may appeal this block by adding {{ unblock|Your reason here}} below this notice. -- Chris (talk) 19:58, 6 July 2021 (UTC) reply