EmJohansson
January 2024
edit
Hello EmJohansson. 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 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:EmJohansson. The template {{Paid}} can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form: {{paid|user=EmJohansson|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) 22:36, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
- I am not being compensated for my edits. EmJohansson (talk) 23:14, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
- But you are an employee of Belmont University, right? ElKevbo (talk) 23:59, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
- Yes. I was correcting out of date information EmJohansson (talk) 17:48, 27 January 2024 (UTC)
- And we appreciate your edits. But please be cautious as you have a very clear and direct conflict of interest with this specific topic. ElKevbo (talk) 19:19, 27 January 2024 (UTC)
- Thank you for the insight. Do you have any examples or more clarification how what edits I am allowed to make/not make? EmJohansson (talk) 21:39, 27 January 2024 (UTC)
- We have a "Plain and simple conflict of interest guide" that is our collective attempt to provide guidance for conflicts of interest.
- In my experience, most editors are okay with COI editors making edits that are clearly non-controversial such as updating information that is already in an article but outdated and correcting obvious mistakes such as typos. Opinions and reactions become more much mixed for more substantive edits as it's not always clear if someone is contributing in good faith or trying to promote (or, in some cases, denigrate) the subject of the article as that can be done very subtly. Conflicts of interest are often about appearance so it's usually best to "avoid even the appearance of impropriety" and just make a suggestion or request in Talk for other editors to evaluate. ElKevbo (talk) 22:23, 27 January 2024 (UTC)
- Thanks for the info! So, did I do that with my edits? I was just adding factual info about the university. EmJohansson (talk) 22:25, 27 January 2024 (UTC)
- Yeah, it looks like most of your edits have been totally fine. I removed a few sentences because they lacked sources but that's no big deal. ElKevbo (talk) 22:36, 27 January 2024 (UTC)
- Is it possible to see a list of which edits were removed, so I can figure out how to update in the correct way? EmJohansson (talk) 22:37, 27 January 2024 (UTC)
- You can see all of the edits made to an article by looking at its history. Here is the history of edits made to Belmont University. This is the specific edit that I made to remove an unsourced sentence about the university's forensics team. ElKevbo (talk) 23:02, 27 January 2024 (UTC)
- I have sources for that statement. How do I show those in edits so they don't get removed?
- https://mainstreetmediatn.com/articles/mainstreetnashville/belmont-speech-and-debate-team-dominates-at-state-contest/
- https://postings.speechwire.com/r-results.php?tournid=14261&groupingid=0&round=F
- https://news.belmont.edu/speech-and-debate-team-breaks-records-on-a-national-level/ EmJohansson (talk) 13:54, 30 January 2024 (UTC)
- You can see all of the edits made to an article by looking at its history. Here is the history of edits made to Belmont University. This is the specific edit that I made to remove an unsourced sentence about the university's forensics team. ElKevbo (talk) 23:02, 27 January 2024 (UTC)
- Is it possible to see a list of which edits were removed, so I can figure out how to update in the correct way? EmJohansson (talk) 22:37, 27 January 2024 (UTC)
- Yeah, it looks like most of your edits have been totally fine. I removed a few sentences because they lacked sources but that's no big deal. ElKevbo (talk) 22:36, 27 January 2024 (UTC)
- Thanks for the info! So, did I do that with my edits? I was just adding factual info about the university. EmJohansson (talk) 22:25, 27 January 2024 (UTC)
- Thank you for the insight. Do you have any examples or more clarification how what edits I am allowed to make/not make? EmJohansson (talk) 21:39, 27 January 2024 (UTC)
- And we appreciate your edits. But please be cautious as you have a very clear and direct conflict of interest with this specific topic. ElKevbo (talk) 19:19, 27 January 2024 (UTC)