CConcannon

January 2023

Hello CConcannon. 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:CConcannon. The template {{Paid}} can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form: {{paid|user=CConcannon|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. 331dot (talk) 20:24, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

I am not receiving, nor do I expect to receive, compensation for editing any pages of Wikipedia, including the page that I edited.

The page that I edited was my first-ever edit on Wikipedia, and I made two very minor changes:

1. add the word "is" to make a complete sentence

2. deleted a duplicate entry in a list of words

What about the nature of these edits gives an impression that I have a financial stake in promoting a topic? CConcannon (talk) 22:34, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

Do you have any association with Sourcegraph? Note that "paid editing" is not limited to specific payment for edits, and includes any paid relationship such as employment. 331dot (talk) 22:38, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

Can you point me to the location in disclosure which clarifies that employment counts as paid editing? I don't see it. If I am wrong, then I will stand corrected. CConcannon (talk) 22:51, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

I take your reply to mean that you are employed by Sourcegraph. If your position involves any form of marketing, sales, communications, or publicity, you must declare as a paid editor even if you have not been specifically asked to edit Wikipedia. That is a Terms of Use mandated legal requirement. If you are saying that you do not work in fields like that, it is true that technically you don't need to declare as a paid editor- but it would build trust with the community to be as open as possible about your relationship with the company.

Even if you are not a paid editor, you have a clear conflict of interest that should be disclosed, see the conflict of interest policy. You should also read about how to make edit requests, which is what you should do in most cases when editing about your company. 331dot (talk) 23:30, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

I'd like to point out that in your last reply, you may have violated Wikipedia's harassment policy by labeling me as a Sourcegraph employee. I asked a question, and your answer was to disclose my personal information.

I understand that you are trying to enforce the rules; however, had you answered my original question, we could have saved a lot of time here. For reference, this was my question: What about the nature of these edits gives an impression that I have a financial stake in promoting a topic?

I made two minor corrections that were entirely justified by correct English language grammar. I did not, in any way, alter the information provided by the article. Therefore, I did not violate the conflict of interest policy in any way. I have no idea why you flagged my edits in the first place.

You make a good point that being open about my relationship with Sourcegraph will help to build trust with the community. I will consider adding that to my user page at some point in the future, if I ever make contributions that include information about the company.

For now, I don't plan to contribute more to Wikipedia. I don't find it to be a welcoming place. CConcannon (talk) 00:08, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

If you aren't an employee, please say so. I don't know anything other than what you have said here. You didn't directly answer my question and your response suggested the answer, if I'm wrong, I apologize.

I'm not sure what I've done that is unwelcoming. I'm trying to help you be aware of our policies so you avoid a problem. I didn't "flag" your edits, but in my experience when new users first edit is on an article about a company, it is often a company employee. Other edits had been made to the article today so I had it watchlisted. I am sorry to cause you bad feelings, just trying to help. 331dot (talk) 01:33, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

I would clarify that, if you are an employee, a conflict of interest exists irrespective of the substance of the edits. Perhaps you don't need to edit request minor grammar changes, but you still have a conflict of interest if you are an employee. 331dot (talk) 01:36, 7 January 2023 (UTC)