174.244.209.131

August 2021

Hello 174.244.209.131. The nature of your edits, such as the one you made to The Raw Story, 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:174.244.209.131. The template {{Paid}} can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form: {{paid|user=174.244.209.131|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. Chetsford (talk) 20:18, 22 August 2021 (UTC)

If this is a shared IP address, and you did not make the edits referred to above, consider creating an account for yourself or logging in with an existing account so that you can avoid further irrelevant notices.

Welcome to Wikipedia. Editors are expected to treat each other with respect and civility. On this encyclopedia project, editors assume good faith while interacting with other editors, which you did not appear to do at The Raw Story. Here is Wikipedia's welcome page, and it is hoped that you will assume the good faith of other editors and continue to help us improve Wikipedia! Thank you very much! Chetsford (talk) 20:19, 22 August 2021 (UTC)

If this is a shared IP address, and you did not make the edits referred to above, consider creating an account for yourself or logging in with an existing account so that you can avoid further irrelevant notices.

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