DoBeautifulThings

October 2019

Hello DoBeautifulThings,

Your recent edits to Keep America Beautiful indicate that you may have a conflict of interest regarding this topic. Please familiarize yourself with the behavioral guideline Wikipedia:Conflict of interest. If you are an employee of this organization or are doing any paid writing, public relations, advertising or promotion for this organization, then you must comply with Wikipedia:Paid-contribution disclosure. This is mandatory and not negotiable.

Wikipedia articles must be written from the neutral point of view. Wikipedia articles do not include registered trademark symbols or language written in the second person such as "We believe everyone has a right to live in a clean, green and beautiful community, and shares a responsibility to contribute to that vision." You cannot include large blocks of unreferenced promotional text, and you cannot remove well-referenced criticisms of the organization. A highly promotional image caption like "In celebration of its 65th anniversary, Keep America Beautiful reintroduced itself to America with a new public service advertisement (PSA) called 'Let’s Talk About America.'" is completely unacceptable. Neutrality is mandatory.

Please comply with all of Wikipedia's policies and guidelines if you want to continue editing this encylopedia. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 23:34, 3 October 2019 (UTC)

Response

Jim:

Thank you for your detailed note of Oct. 4 about the Keep America Beautiful entry and the link to Wikipedia Guidelines. We appreciate your assistance and most certainly intend on complying with the guidelines. We did establish a "DoBeautifulThings" login to update our Wikipedia page. We are indeed employed by Keep America Beautiful and will disclose that, as appropriate. Our apologies on that front.

It was our best intention to update the page, which hadn't been updated in some time -- and hoped to present a fair and neutral view of our organization. Generally speaking, we believe that the term “greenwashing” – used in the entry - is disparaging and mischaracterizes the work that we are currently doing. The adjustments we tried to make cite the founding minutes of the organization from 1953, which clarifies which organizations were present and part of our founding. Some of the companies cited has been inaccurately stated as a “fact” for many years.

With that said, we would appreciate your continued review of this page to ensure it meets Wikipedia standards – our goals are 100% aligned here.

To reiterate:

• We will comply with Wikipedia:Paid-contribution disclosure.
• We will not include registered trademark symbols or language written in the second person. (e.g., "We believe everyone has a right to live in a clean, green and beautiful community, and shares a responsibility to contribute to that vision.")
• We will not remove well-referenced criticisms of the organization.
• We will adhere to the ethos of neutrality!

Questions:

• While we will not include large blocks of unreferenced promotional text, is it possible to update some of the statistics related to current programs?
• We now understand that we shouldn't include a promotional image caption. Is it inappropriate, however, to include an image that shows a current PSA campaign in juxtaposition to the 1971 PSA campaign? That's what we were trying to get across ...

Thank you again for taking the time to educate Keep America Beautiful staff on the proper usage and guidelines for Wikipedia contributors.

Keep America Beautiful — Preceding unsigned comment added by DoBeautifulThings (talk • contribs)

You have referred to yourself as "we" above. How many people have access to this account? --Drm310 🍁 (talk) 22:35, 4 October 2019 (UTC)