JP4115

Hello, JP4115. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places, or things you have written about in the article OnDeck Capital, you may have a conflict of interest (COI). Editors with a COI may be unduly influenced by their connection to the topic, and it is important when editing Wikipedia articles that such connections be completely transparent. See the conflict of interest guideline and FAQ for organizations for more information. In particular, we ask that you please:

• avoid editing or creating articles related to you and your family, friends, school, company, club, or organization, as well as any competing companies' projects or products;
• instead, you are encouraged to propose changes on the Talk pages of affected article(s) (see the {{request edit}} template);
• when discussing affected articles, disclose your COI (see WP:DISCLOSE);
• avoid linking to the Wikipedia article or to the website of your organization in other articles (see WP:SPAM);
• exercise great caution so that you do not violate Wikipedia's content policies.

In addition, you must disclose your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution which forms all or part of work for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation (see WP:PAID).

Please take a few moments to read and review Wikipedia's policies regarding conflicts of interest, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, sourcing and autobiographies.

Also please note that editing for the purpose of advertising, publicising, or promoting anyone or anything is not permitted. Thank you. Melcous (talk) 14:50, 16 September 2017 (UTC)

Reply - OnDeck Capital

Hi and thanks for your message on my talk page. Thank you for disclosing that you have been paid to edit this article. This means that you are strongly discouraged from continuing to edit the article but instead encouraged to make suggestions for improvement on the talk page. You should also not be the one to remove the maintenance templates.

You asked what is still on the page that is promotional. I would say plenty. For starters, even the opening line "OnDeck capital is a non-bank online platform for small business lending" is the kind of thing a company would say about itself in its marketing brochures, not how encyclopaedias should be worded. A more standard intro might be "OnDeck capital is an American small business lending company" or something similar. See WP:NPOV for more information.

Wikipedia articles should be written in plain and simple language that can be understood by the average reader who is not a specialist in the field. So under history sentences like "OnDeck uses proprietary software to aggregate data about a business’ operations, which is processed by an algorithm that determines loan eligibility" or "OnDeck has delivered more than $7 billion in capital" again use the kind of English that is used in marketing copy rather than in an encyclopaedia and it should be made much more neutral and simple.

If you have suggestions for how this can be made more appropriate for wikipedia, please feel free to reply here or on the article talk page.

Thanks, Melcous (talk) 12:05, 19 September 2017 (UTC)