Laura Mabry

October 2022

Hello Laura Mabry. 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:Laura Mabry. The template {{Paid}} can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form: {{paid|user=Laura Mabry|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) 19:32, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

Hello. Thank you for reaching out. I am an employee of the University of Illinois System. I am the marketing writer on the external relations and communications team. I believe I followed the directions above by creating and adding information to my user page.

I am new to this, and I appreciate any further guidance you can provide. Thank you.

Laura Laura Mabry (talk) 19:53, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

For most edits to your employer's article(s), you'll want to stick to making requests or suggestions in the article's Talk page; that helps you mitigate your conflict of interest. If you don't get a timely response to a request or suggestion, feel free to ping me on my User Talk page or drop a line at WT:UNI. ElKevbo (talk) 21:07, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for the quick response. I understand that going forward. What happens with the changes I made today? Laura Mabry (talk) 21:09, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

The content you added was copied from another website, and thus was a violation of Wikipedia's copyright policy. Please don't add copyright material to Wikipedia. — Diannaa (talk) 12:16, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

Hello. I made multiple changes yesterday, some for grammar and some for accuracy. The content appears to be rolled back to before I made changes, which I understand. Is it OK for me to (1) share all my non-copyright proposed changes on the talk page now that I have (2) appropriately, I believe, created the Laura Mabry (talk) page with my affiliation disclosure? Because I want to be sure I'm following the rules, I won't act until I receive responses on both items. Thank you for all the help here. Laura Mabry (talk) 16:03, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

Your declaration looks okay. — Diannaa (talk) 00:06, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for that clarity. I'll proceed soon as @ElKevbo advised. Laura Mabry (talk) 14:14, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

We welcome you sharing suggestions and proposals on the article's Talk page! In my experience, it's most helpful if you can (a) be specific and clear about changes you are proposing or requesting, (b) write text that editors can copy-and-paste into the article, complete with correct formatting and formatted references, and (c) include succinct and explicit explanations for proposed changes. It's okay if you need help, especially with the formatting! But please keep in mind that nearly all of us are volunteers so the easier you can make this then the more appreciative we will be. ElKevbo (talk) 00:51, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for the guidance. I will take this path soon. Laura Mabry (talk) 14:14, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

Hello, @Diannaa and @ElKevbo. I proposed some addition to the U of I System page on the article's Talk page as you suggested. I know you are all amazing volunteers, so I'm not pushing. But what should happen next? Should I expect a response? Wait for a response before adding what I hope to add? Laura Mabry (talk) 20:59, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Sorry, we can't add those edits, because both of the proposed paragraphs are copied from the school's website. That's a violation of our copyright policy. In the future, to attract the attention of editors who work on coi edits, please include the template {{request edit}} at the top of your edit request. — Diannaa (talk) 22:28, 6 December 2022 (UTC)