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Here's wishing you a welcome to Wikipedia, MPIinfooffice. Thank you for your contributions. Here are some useful links, which have information to help editors get the most out of Wikipedia:

Also, when you post on talk pages you should sign your name using four tildes (~~~~); that should automatically produce your username and the date after your post.

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! If you have any questions, feel free to leave me a message on my talk page, consult Wikipedia:Questions, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there.

Again, welcome! Jytdog (talk) 08:05, 24 February 2016 (UTC)Reply

Username issue

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  Welcome to Wikipedia. I noticed that your username, "MPIinfooffice", 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 invited to use a username that contains such a name if it identifies you personally, such as "Jack 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. Moreover, I recommend that you read our conflict of interest guideline. If you are a single individual and are willing to contribute to Wikipedia in an unbiased manner, please create a new account or request a change of username, by completing this form, 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. Jytdog (talk) 08:05, 24 February 2016 (UTC)Reply

Conflict of interest in Wikipedia

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Hi MPIinfooffice. You clearly work for the Max Planck Institute. Please stop editing and address the issue with your username, per the notice above.

Also, you have a conflict of interest, and you should not be editing the article directly. I'm giving you notice of our Conflict of Interest guideline and Terms of Use, and will have some comments and requests for you below.

  Hello, MPIinfooffice. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places or things you have written about on Wikipedia, you may have a conflict of interest (COI). Editors with a COI may be unduly influenced by their connection to the topic. See the conflict of interest guideline and FAQ for organizations for more information. In particular, please:

  • avoid editing or creating articles related to you and your circle, your organization, its competitors, projects or products;
  • instead propose changes on the talk pages of affected articles (see the {{request edit}} template);
  • when discussing affected articles, disclose your COI (see WP:DISCLOSE);
  • avoid linking to the Wikipedia article or 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 for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation (see WP:PAID).

Please familiarize yourself with relevant policies and guidelines, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, sourcing and autobiographies. Thank you.

Comments and requests

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Wikipedia is a widely-used reference work and managing conflict of interest is essential for ensuring the integrity of Wikipedia and retaining the public's trust in it. As in academia, COI is managed here in two steps - disclosure and a form of peer review. Please note that there is no bar to being part of the Wikipedia community if you want to be involved in articles where you have a conflict of interest; there are just some things we ask you to do (and if you are paid, some things you need to do).

We manage COI with two steps. The first step is disclosure, and that is done - you have disclosed that you work for the MPI via your username.

The second is what I call "peer review". This piece may seem a bit strange to you at first, but if you think about it, it will make sense. In Wikipedia, editors can immediately publish their work, with no intervening publisher or standard peer review -- you can just create an article, click save, and viola there is a new article, and you can go into any article, make changes, click save, and done. No intermediary - no publisher, no editors.

What we ask editors to do who have a COI and want to work on articles where their COI is relevant, is a) if you want to create an article relevant to a COI you have, create the article as a draft, disclose your COI on the Talk page using the appropriate template, and then submit the draft article through the WP:AFC process so it can be reviewed before it publishes; and b) And if you want to change content in any existing article on a topic where you have a COI, we ask you to propose content on the Talk page for others to review and implement before it goes live, instead of doing it directly yourself. You can make the edit request easily - and provide notice to the community of your request - by using the "edit request" function as described in the conflict of interest guideline. I made that easy for you by adding a section to the beige box at the top of the Talk page at Talk:Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics - there is a link at "click here" in that section -- if you click that, the Wikipedia software will automatically format a section in which you can make your request.

By following those "peer review" processes, editors with a COI can contribute where they have a COI, and the integrity of WP can be protected. I hope that makes sense to you.

I want to add here that per the WP:COI guideline, if you want to directly update simple, uncontroversial facts (for example, correcting the facts about where the company has offices) you can do that directly in the article, without making an edit request on the Talk page. Just be sure to always cite a reliable source for the information you change, and make sure it is simple, factual, uncontroversial content.

Will you please agree to follow the peer review processes going forward, when you want to work on the the MPI article or any article where your COI is relevant? Do let me know, and if anything above doesn't make sense I would be happy to discuss. Thanks! Jytdog (talk) 08:11, 24 February 2016 (UTC)Reply