GCMI Dan

Your username

Welcome to Wikipedia. I noticed that your username, "CityofGardenCity", may not comply with our username policy. Please note that you may not use a username that represents the name of a company, group, organization, product, or website. Examples of usernames that are not allowed include "XYZ Company", "MyWidgetsUSA.com", and "Foobar Museum of Art". However, you are permitted to use a username that contains such a name if it identifies you individually, such as "Sara Smith at XYZ Company", "Mark at WidgetsUSA", or "FoobarFan87".

Please also note that Wikipedia does not allow accounts to be shared by multiple people, and that you may not advocate for or promote any company, group, organization, product, or website, regardless of your username. Please also read our paid editing policy and our conflict of interest guideline. If you are a single individual and are willing to contribute to Wikipedia in an unbiased manner, please request a change of username, by completing this form, choosing a username that complies with our username policy. If you believe that your username does not violate our policy, please leave a note here explaining why. Thank you. LynxTufts (talk) 21:32, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

February 2019

Hello GCMI Dan. The nature of your edits gives the impression you have an undisclosed financial stake in promoting a topic, such as the edit you made to Garden City, Michigan, 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 egregious type of COI; the Wikimedia Foundation regards it as a "black hat" practice akin to Black hat SEO.

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, and if it does not, 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:GCMI Dan. The template {{Paid}} can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form: {{paid|user=GCMI Dan|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. John from Idegon (talk) 17:03, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

Hello :John from Idegon

I need clarification...I am the Communications Director for the City of Garden City and it is the community's desire to correct inaccurate and out of date information on a page the represents our town, including photos that do not represent the current condition of the images on the "page." As a lifetime resident of this community, I am far more qualified to provide this information that someone who has no knowledge of the town. Regarding undisclosed paid advocacy, I created a user name that made it clear where the edits where coming from and was forced to change the user name. I find this entire process counter productive and designed to perpetuate inaccurate content. I don't believe there is conflict of interest here since I am attempting to correct inaccurate information for a community- not a for profit business. Please advise and thanks for your input. This is obviously my first attempt at any of this, I find it all very daunting. I'm not even sure this is the appropriate way to respond. GCMI Dan (talk) 18:56, 27 February 2019 (UTC)GCMI Dan

So you are quite clearly a WP:PAID editor. You need to comply with the Wikimedia Foundation's legally binding terms of use prior to making any further edits regarding Garden City. That includes asking questions about editing the article. The encyclopedia article in Wikipedia is not in any way "for" the city, nor do you have any special privileges regarding the article's content. Your assertion that somehow you are in a better position to edit the article is patently false. All content in an encyclopedia article must be derived from reliable published secondary sources. So how do you figure you're in a better position to edit it than others? Your edits have so far been attempts to insert a photographic image into the article that has been published elsewhere. That makes its copyright status questionable and therefore we cannot use it. I'm going to ask an administrator, Swarm, to step in here and I'm going to remove myself from this discussion. My opinion (one shared with many, if not most active editors here) is that what you are here trying to do is despicable. One would assume that in order to obtain an administrative position with a not small city, one has to have a bit of education, and I'm sorry, but an educated person should be able to discern the difference between social media and and an encyclopedia. We are here to summarize and distribute factual information as recorded in various reliable sources. We are not here to allow the city to bolster its image. Good bye. John from Idegon (talk) 19:26, 27 February 2019 (UTC)