ChrisN at The Student Room

October 2024

Hello ChrisN at The Student Room. 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 employed (or being compensated in any way) by a person, group, company or organization to promote their interests. Paid advocacy on Wikipedia must be disclosed even if you have not specifically been asked to edit Wikipedia. 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 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 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:ChrisN at The Student Room. The template {{Paid}} can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form: {{paid|user=ChrisN at The Student Room|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) 07:50, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for replying to me. Sorry, I spent several hours researching the best approach for this and set myself up a username with what I believed to be the best practice approach. I then requested edits, rather than made them to ensure I adhered to Wikipedia policies.

I hadn't appreciated that I needed to make that disclosure on my user profile too - but can do that too. Thanks for pointing that out. I am the main shareholder and CEO of The Student Room, and would just like to see a really helpful and informative, and objective, description of us. I am happy to put the work in on this and ensure that I adhere to all guidelines. The Student Room is a well-respected large UK education community website with lots of government and education sector support, and public interest, so it seems a shame to have an outdated description of it, which has been noted as needing more work.

I am also happy to make broader contributions to editing Wikipedia. It is a great resource.

If I make that declaration, am I able to make edits to this page? or should I request changes in the Talk?

Thank you for your patience in helping me get this right. ChrisN at The Student Room (talk) 08:02, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

You should almost always request changes on the talk page as edit requests(which you have already). Times where you are permitted to make direct edits are listed here- basically anything completely uncontroversial, where no reasonable person could possibly object. The paid disclosure is required by the Terms of Use and does not permit you to begin making COI edits directly as you see fit.

One thing you can do yourself is work towards providing an updated logo- you won't be able to upload it yourself yet(your account must be four days old with at least 10 edits to do that) but you can go to Files for Upload to work with others to get an updated logo here. Do not upload it to Commons. 331dot (talk) 08:10, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

That's great. Thank you so much. Will do! ChrisN at The Student Room (talk) 08:15, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for disclosing. 331dot (talk) 08:13, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

Your Files for Upload request: The Student Room logo 2024.png

Hello, and thank you for your request at Files for upload! The file has been uploaded. Regards, NotAGenious (talk) 12:55, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

Wonderful. Thank you! ChrisN at The Student Room (talk) 12:50, 7 October 2024 (UTC)