User talk:ABCNews EH

Your username

Please review the policy on user names. Your name suggests you are an official representative of ABC News, something your employer may not approve of, and Wikipedia does not permit group / corporate accounts. It's actually firmly against policy and you would be permanently blocked for that.... Nevertheless, transparency is good, and given that people do IP searches, people would figure it out if you are editing from a company account. You might want to give some more thought to the degree of anonymity you seek.... Nothing wrong with making suggestions on a talk page but there are certain conflict of interest and spam-related rules here that may differ from journalistic standards. Best to consider requesting a new user name or starting again with a new account. I don't say this in any official capacity, just helping out. Wikidemon (talk) 18:48, 29 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Response to Username

Just reached out to one of your Wiki editors, Jay Walsh, about starting to contribute and create a forum on Wikipedia. We had a great introduction to your site and organization and very excited about Wikipedia. For the meantime, I set up this username assigned to my account to start participating on Wikipedia. He advised being transparent about being an editor for the site to the readers in the post. Please do not lock my account. ABCNews (talk) 19:11, 29 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Just a note, you may be interested in contributing to Wikinews, one of the sister sites of Wikipedia (although there are various policies there that you should read first). Us wikinewsies are always keen for partnerships :) Matt/TheFearow (Talk) 21:32, 29 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

October 2008

You have been blocked indefinitely from editing in accordance with Wikipedia's blocking policy for being an unsanctioned role account. If you believe this block is unjustified you may contest this block by adding the text {{unblock|your reason here}} below. Blueboy 96 22:37, 29 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Good grief. This shouldn't have been done. ABCNews - I've unblocked you, sorry for the trouble. At the suggestion of a Wikimedia employee, I've renamed you to 'ABCNews EH'. If you'd like a new username, let me know and I'll take care of it. Kind regards — Dan | talk 18:09, 30 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Welcome

Hello ABCNews EH, and Welcome to Wikipedia!

Welcome to Wikipedia! I hope you enjoy the encyclopedia and want to stay. As a first step, you may wish to read the Introduction.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask me at my talk page — I'm happy to help. Or, you can ask your question at the New contributors' help page.

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If you would like to play around with your new Wiki skills the Sandbox is for you.

MBisanz Good luck, and have fun. --MBisanz ^talk 18:23, 30 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Please reinstate block.

It's not clear what the backstory (if any) there is on the existence of this user account, and what it is or is not supposed to be used for, but the very idea of a paid employee of a news organization being tasked to make hamhanded, clearly promotional edits such as this and this looks to me to be blatant misuse. I really don't want to wake up one day and find talk pages full of things like this obvious hawking of commerical products, either. Mike Doughney (talk) 21:41, 3 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Anyone can edit. That is our policy. Bastique ^demandez 21:49, 3 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Let me explain a bit better. If she's editing in a way that's contrary to our COI guidelines, like inserting links to her own articles on article pages, then yes, you should discuss this with her in a kind manner before issuing a block. I certainly see no issue with her suggesting the links on talk pages of articles, and dicussions about external links that might improve articles are not only appropriate, they're welcome. You shouldn't jump to block anyone who appears to have a conflict of interest. Wikipedia welcomes everyone to contribute (with a few execptions) regardless of whether they're professionals in some industry or ordinary people like the rest of us. Bastique ^demandez 22:00, 3 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Adding links

Hello ABCNews EH. New Wikipedia editors sometimes start out by adding external links to articles, thinking that this may be easier than adding or revising text. Adding links, though, quickly runs into our anti-spam system and misunderstandings do occur. If you are willing to spend a bit of time getting more familiar with Wikipedia, others will be happy to suggest non-controversial improvements that you could make, to get experience. If your affiliation with ABC News implies that you might be able to call upon some ABC resources, to look up information or perhaps even to get photo permissions, let us know and we could suggest other ideas. EdJohnston (talk) 18:13, 4 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Suggestion

I'm sorry to tell you this, but you were the subject of some very heated discussion between administrators about what precisely counts as "inappropriate" and "promotional" and "open" and "concealed" and so on: our guidelines state that usernames which include company names are discouraged, but not prohibited, but then there's the "slippery slope" argument, and etc etc etc.

With that in mind, I would like to suggest that you change your username again; my recommendation is that you be "Eleanor H", and that on your userpage you state "I am an editor for ABC News".

As an additional benefit, this means that you can continue to use the account should you choose to leave ABC at some point. DS (talk) 19:59, 4 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]