Sweetpea05

November 2022

Hello ACMnews. 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:ACMnews. The template {{Paid}} can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form: {{paid|user=ACMnews|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) 22:10, 7 November 2022 (UTC)

Hi, I'm new to this and will add the disclosure and specify the nature of the changes - I wasn't offering details in edits. I was citing using outside information but I'll do better. ACMnews (talk) 13:17, 8 November 2022 (UTC)

Please re-read all of the message above and do not edit again until you abide by it. If you have a paid editing relationship with the college then you MUST disclose that. If you have a conflict of interest, you should NOT be editing the article but should be making suggestions and requests in its Talk page.

Additionally, your username, "ACMnews", 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, service, or website. Further, 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, service, or website, regardless of your username. If you are a single individual and are willing to contribute to Wikipedia in an unbiased manner, please request a change of username by completing the form at Special:GlobalRenameRequest, choosing a username that complies with our username policy. Alternatively, you can just create a new account and use that for editing. If you believe that your username does not violate our policy, please leave a note here explaining why. Thank you. ElKevbo (talk) 13:45, 8 November 2022 (UTC)

Thank you. I think I'm understanding more and will try that. ACMnews (talk) 16:08, 8 November 2022 (UTC)

I don't know if you are understanding more. You previously indicated that you're a paid employee of the institution. If that is the case, you should not be making substantive edits to the article. Please clarify your relationship with the institution. If you do indeed have a paid editing relationship, please add the relevant notice to your Userpage and stop editing the article. ElKevbo (talk) 23:43, 10 November 2022 (UTC)

@Sweetpea05: We need a clear "yes" or "no" answer from you on the question of whether you are employed by Allegany College of Maryland. Please refrain from editing the article any further until you have responded. --Drm310 🍁 (talk) 05:15, 11 November 2022 (UTC)

Notice of Conflict of interest noticeboard discussion

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard regarding a possible conflict of interest incident with which you may be involved. Thank you. ElKevbo (talk) 14:02, 8 November 2022 (UTC)

I will delete this account to remove this conflict. thank you. ACMnews (talk) 16:11, 8 November 2022 (UTC)

I'm trying the change of username option and appreciate your help navigating this. Thank you again. ACMnews (talk) 16:17, 8 November 2022 (UTC)

Try this form - it should be the right one to request a username change. ElKevbo (talk) 17:13, 8 November 2022 (UTC)

Sweetpea05: It seems you are a paid editor, and you do not have a compliant disclosure. You must disclose this, for example, adding the {{paid}} templnate to your user page, including your employer and who is paying. Note that you'll end up blocked if you continue doing paid editing without a proper disclosure. MarioGom (talk) 17:10, 20 November 2022 (UTC)