Conflict of interest policy

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  Hello, Avorio. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places, or things you have written about on Wikipedia, you may have a conflict of interest (COI). Editors with a COI may be unduly influenced by their connection to the topic, and it is important when editing Wikipedia articles that such connections be completely transparent. See the conflict of interest guideline and FAQ for organizations for more information. In particular, we ask that you please:

  • avoid editing or creating articles related to you and your family, friends, school, company, club, or organization, as well as any competing companies' projects or products;
  • instead, you are encouraged to propose changes on the Talk pages of affected article(s) (see the {{request edit}} template);
  • when discussing affected articles, disclose your COI (see WP:DISCLOSE);
  • avoid linking to the Wikipedia article or to the website of your organization in other articles (see WP:SPAM);
  • exercise great caution so that you do not violate Wikipedia's content policies.

In addition, you must disclose your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation (see WP:PAID).

Please take a few moments to read and review Wikipedia's policies regarding conflicts of interest, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, sourcing and autobiographies. Thank you. --Ronz (talk) 16:40, 26 April 2017 (UTC)Reply

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Hello Avorio. The nature of your edits gives the impression you have an undisclosed financial stake in promoting a topic, such as the edit you made to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 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:Avorio. The template {{Paid}} can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form: {{paid|user=Avorio|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. Needless to say, this also includes your edits to Template:OpenMusicLibrary. Note paid editing includes being an employee of a company whose duties include digital marketing and strategy and/or having a financial interest the company. Voceditenore (talk) 11:05, 21 June 2018 (UTC)Reply

  • Hello, Voceditenore! Thanks for your message. I am the creator and maintainer of the Open Music Library site, which is the world's largest repository of open access resources for the study of music. We have indexed over 200,000 scores by composers from many national libraries and other digital collections, alongside over 1 million articles from music journals and magazines. I thought that by adding links to the Open Music Library from Wikipedia, we would be enhancing users' experience when researching a composer, or discovering their works. I noticed that there are links to other sites that complements Wikipedia's content, e.g. IMDb, and I thought links to the Open Music Library would be an interesting addition too. Do you have an objection to those links? I'd be interested in reading your views on this. Thank you.
First of all, the OML is a commercial venture and a subsidiary of Pro-Quest. A large proportion of the current content is behind paywalls or requires subscription. You can read the discussion at WikiProject Classical music where I outline in detail why these links are being removed. That you and/or your colleagues placed your company's link first in all the "External links" sections is highly indicative as is Template:OpenMusicLibrary, which until I edited it, contained two links to your company' website, a typical SEO tactic. As an employee of that company, you should not be adding links to it in any article. At best, you can suggest the link on the talk page of the article. If editors think it is useful, they will add it. But I strongly suggest that you also read the guidelines at Wikipedia:External links, especially this section. Voceditenore (talk) 15:50, 21 June 2018 (UTC)Reply