User talk:MMcCulloughatnewhavendotedu

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16:03, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

January 2021

Hello MMcCulloughatnewhavendotedu. 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:MMcCulloughatnewhavendotedu. The template {{Paid}} can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form: {{paid|user=MMcCulloughatnewhavendotedu|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. ElKevbo (talk) 16:38, 25 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Responding to ElKevbo

Please excuse the ignorance on how to reply - I'm not sure I've ever received a message from a moderator, before. I do work at University of New Haven, and, have added the citation you suggested to my User page. The edits I'm attempting to make to the University of New Haven page are all factual and I have references. If they should be made in another way, can you help me to understand how we should go about this? Or, is my citation on my page (just added) sufficient? Thanks, Matt — Preceding unsigned comment added by MMcCulloughatnewhavendotedu (talk • contribs) 11:52, January 25, 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick reply. I strongly recommend that you limit your edits about your employer to the article's Talk page; you can make requests and suggestions there for other editors to evaluate and potentially carry out so there's no question about whether you made an edit with a conflict of interest. ElKevbo (talk) 18:16, 25 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks again. For the direct edits I've already made, should I move those to talk, now, or leave them as-is and start doing new edits on Talk? MMcCulloughatnewhavendotedu (talk) 18:20, 25 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I looked at your edits and I think it's okay to just leave them. We're generally okay with even COI editors making very straight-forward, non-controversial updates to articles; it's best to avoid making any direct edits but we value commonsense, too, so we don't get exercised about edits that are clearly non-promotional updates of existing context. ElKevbo (talk) 18:30, 25 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]