Sunbeam2019

Managing a conflict of interest

Hello, Sunbeam2019. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places or things you have written about in the page Pennsylvania Trolley Museum, 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 organizations for more information. We ask that you:

• avoid editing or creating articles about yourself, your family, friends, company, organization or competitors;
• propose changes on the talk pages of affected articles (see the {{request edit}} template);
• disclose your conflict of interest when discussing affected articles (see WP:DISCLOSE);
• avoid linking to your organization's website in other articles (see WP:SPAM);
• do your best to comply with 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).

Also please note that editing for the purpose of advertising, publicising, or promoting anyone or anything is not permitted. Thank you. HickoryOughtShirt?4 (talk) 19:26, 15 January 2019 (UTC)

Hello. I am an employee of the museum which is exactly why I am desperately attempting to update the page which currently consists of out-dated and incorrect information. I am not getting paid for this update and am honestly just trying to provide accurate information. This page is connected to the museum's profile on google and therefore is not beneficial to have out-dated information. How would you suggest I edit the page in a ethical manner? None of the information I posted was a promotion or advertisement. Sunbeam2019 (talk) 19:37, 15 January 2019 (UTC)

Hi Sunbeam2019. Were you also using User:PA Trolley Museum? If so, did you not see the notice about conflict of interest editing there? You need to WP:DISCLOSE you conflict of interest on your userpage and article talk page (Talk:Pennsylvania Trolley Museum) and then make edit requests using WP:Edit requests. This is the only way the community is okay with conflict of interest editing. Of course, the most acceptable and wildly approved way of going about this would be to not edit at all. Speaking of your edits, all of the content you added was promotional and unsourced. Please read over our verifiability and neutral point of view policy after disclosing. All of your content failed our neutral point of view and was very obviously promotional. Look at how other pages are written, like Oregon Electric Railway Museum, to see how to write in a neutral tone. HickoryOughtShirt?4 (talk) 19:44, 15 January 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for the information. I will delete both of my user pages and not edit the page further nor use the platform in the future. I will knowingly allow incorrect and out-dated information about the museum stand.Sunbeam2019 (talk) 20:03, 15 January 2019 (UTC)

January 2019

Hello Sunbeam2019. 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 Pennsylvania Trolley Museum, 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:Sunbeam2019. The template {{Paid}} can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form: {{paid|user=Sunbeam2019|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. HickoryOughtShirt?4 (talk) 19:31, 15 January 2019 (UTC)