User talk:Archivist007

June 2022

Hello Archivist007. 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:Archivist007. The template {{Paid}} can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form: {{paid|user=Archivist007|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. MrOllie (talk) 15:02, 28 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Dear MrOllie,

Thank you for bringing this to our attention. Indeed, my name is Fiona and I work for READ-COOP (https://readcoop.eu/), who manage the Transkribus software. We wanted our Wikipedia page to be up-to-date, as the current page is rather brief and does not really explain properly what the software can be used for and how. We did not intend to break any of Wikipedia's rules. As a co-operative owned by a network of members including universities and state archives, "black-hat" marketing practices are not something we believe in.

Can you please inform me how we should best update our page without breaking the rules? How do we find neutral editors who can work with us to improve our page?

Best wishes,

Fiona Archivist007 (talk) 14:52, 30 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Dear @MrOllie

I was wondering if you would be able to reply to my above message, and let us know more about how we can proceed with our page?

Many thanks,

Fiona Archivist007 (talk) 11:48, 18 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

You should read the links in the message above. If you have further questions, WP:TEAHOUSE is a good place to ask them. MrOllie (talk) 12:16, 18 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Dear @MrOllie

Many thanks, I have reviewed the links in detail.

One of the members of our co-operative also happens to also be an active Wikipedia editor. He suggested we ask you for more details about why you flagged the page in the first place. Now we have disclosed our affiliation, is it possible to have our original edits re-instated, or was there a problem with the edits we tried to make? Just to be clear here, our goal is to inform, not to be promotional.

Best wishes,

Fiona Archivist007 (talk) 11:56, 21 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

No, even if you have disclosed, Wikipedia is not a place to advertise. MrOllie (talk) 12:46, 21 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Dear @MrOllie

I'm sorry, I think I need a little bit more support from your side to understand your actions here. Can I please enquire which part of the edits we attempted to make were advertising?

Perhaps I should give a brief overview of our cooperative, so that you can better understand our motives. The Transkribus software is managed by READ-COOP: a Societas cooperativa Europaea or European co-operative. We are a non-profit organisation and the majority of our members are non-profit organisations such as universities, archives and libraries (you can see the full list here: https://readcoop.eu/members/ ). That means that, just like Wikipedia, we have no investors and every bit of profit we make goes back into software development based on the needs of our members.

For us, updating our Wikipedia page is not about advertising but about informing people that there is software they can use to digitise old historical documents (something that was not possible until very recently so very few people are even aware that this type of software exists). We re-wrote the page with these aims in mind. Therefore, I would like to ask you again, which parts of our original edits were deemed too promotional? We would appreciate it if you share your concerns with us, so that we can address them in more detail.

Many thanks for taking the time to assist us,

Fiona Archivist007 (talk) 15:49, 21 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Profit vs non-profit status is immaterial - Wikipedia is not a venue for you to try to get the word out about your software. I deemed all of your edits, from top to bottom, to be promotional. This shouldn't be surprising, because 'informing people that there is software' is exactly the definition of promotion. If you have further questions about Wikipedia or its operations, feel free to as them at WP:TEAHOUSE, I think I'm done repeating myself here. - MrOllie (talk) 16:36, 21 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]