Pmitros
April 2024
edit
Hello, Pmitros. 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 conflict of interest may be unduly influenced by their connection to the topic. See the conflict of interest guideline and FAQ for article subjects for more information. We ask that you:
- avoid editing or creating articles about yourself, your family, friends, colleagues, company, organization, clients, or competitors;
- propose changes on the talk pages of affected articles (you can use the {{edit COI}} template)—don't forget to give details of reliable sources supporting your suggestions;
- disclose your conflict of interest when discussing affected articles (see Wikipedia:Conflict of interest § How to disclose a COI);
- avoid linking to your organization's website in other articles (see Wikipedia:Spam § External link spamming);
- do your best to comply with Wikipedia's content policies.
In addition, you are required by the Wikimedia Foundation's terms of use to 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 Wikipedia:Paid-contribution disclosure.
Also, editing for the purpose of advertising, publicising, or promoting anyone or anything is not permitted. Thank you. ElKevbo (talk) 12:52, 28 April 2024 (UTC)
- Did I violate this policy in any way? This was precisely the violation I was trying to address, and I did my very best to comply myself. Specifically:
- I reverted bad-faith edits by edX PR staff. Aside from minor typographical errors, and one minor factual error (edX was started by the MIT/Harvard administrations, and not by scientists), I do not believe I did much else.
- I left comments on the talk page about this, exactly to disclose my own conflict-of-interest.
- I provided more in-depth background on the talk page of Open edX so that someone more objective could clean up the pages.
- When I later noticed there was a broader pattern of astroturfing, I left a talk comment on the edX web page, since this should be cleaned up. To be specific, all of the edits by nedbat and other edX PR staff should be treated as having an undisclosed conflict-of-interest, in violation of Wikipedia policy.
- Someone neutral and objective absolutely should go in and figure out how to clean this mess up. Copy should not be written either by corporate PR departments, nor by the author of the platform.
- If someone wants to take this on, I am very glad to provide primary references. But I agree I should not be the one to do it.
- If I made a transgression, please let me know what it is. I was trying to be careful. Pmitros (talk) 13:48, 28 April 2024 (UTC)