BluSwedeShu

February 2023

Hello BluSwedeShu. 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:BluSwedeShu. The template {{Paid}} can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form: {{paid|user=BluSwedeShu|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. 331dot (talk) 00:15, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

You are correct in that I have been asked by my employer to ensure (to avoid litigious action by companies affected by the errors) that the information about our company is correct - I wasn't aware this was conflict of interest. I'm happy to disclose the fact that I occasionally edit on behalf of a company but I don't understand how to use a 'template'... I will investigate to see if I can figure it out but if there's any information you can point me to, that would be appreciated. BluSwedeShu (talk) 20:51, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for your honesty. If you were asked by your employer to edit, instead of the conflict of interest disclosure you must make the stricter paid editing disclosure; this is a Terms of Use requirement. I'm going to post a "form letter" below with instructions on how to do this(it will tell you to respond to the message, you may disregard that as you already are responding). Then you just need to read WP:COI for information on best practices(this plain language explanation may also help). 331dot (talk) 21:16, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

Hello BluSwedeShu. 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:BluSwedeShu. The template {{Paid}} can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form: {{paid|user=BluSwedeShu|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. 331dot (talk) 21:17, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

In order to post the template message, highlight and copy it when viewing this page, then go to User:BluSwedeShu and paste it in the edit window, replacing the words "employer" with your employer, "client" with the client(if different) and so on. I can help if you have difficulty. 331dot (talk) 21:21, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

Great, thank you. :-) BluSwedeShu (talk) 20:51, 21 February 2023 (UTC)