WriteJames

Welcome!

Hello, WriteJames, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions, especially your edits to W. Mark Lanier. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:

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Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or , and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome! –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 22:31, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

Managing a conflict of interest

Hello, WriteJames. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places or things you have written about in the page W. Mark Lanier, 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, colleagues, company, organization or competitors;
• propose changes on the talk pages of affected articles (you can use the {{request edit}} template);
• 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 WP:Spam);
• 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. –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 22:33, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

If this notice does not answer the questions you had here, then please let me know by pinging me. –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 22:35, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

It might be annoying, but you aren't allowed to make edits like this, this, or this. Even if they're minor, since you are a paid editor it's completely against policy per WP:COIEDIT. –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 22:44, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

Hello, @MJL:. Thank you for taking the time to get in touch. Regarding edits that have been made to Mark Lanier’s Wikipedia page in the past, I believe I’ve followed the guidelines laid out for those who may have a conflict of interest. Namely, stating that there was a conflict, as well as using the request edit template to suggest changes to the page. In fact, substantial changes to the page were made by an editor, rather than myself. After this, a second editor came in and made additional changes, saying that I hadn't given the complete story, despite everything I cited being factually accurate and checked by a member of the Wikipedia community. I suppose my question is, am I still able to suggest edits to the page where appropriate? My goal would be to make sure the text conforms to Wikipedia guidelines so that the banners at the top of the page can be removed. Would you be able to provide any guidance or insight in what I need to do to make that happen? Thank you. WriteJames (talk) 22:56, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

Great work!

Hi James, I've been following the Lanier discussion and want to congratulate you for standing your ground and calling out that awful editor. Let me know if you want to discuss. Again, nice work. DanDavidCook (talk) 21:15, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

Regrading your claim at Talk:W. Mark Lanier about being contacted to keep the page

Hello, I noticed that you made a claim against an editor stating that they contacted the subject of the article asking for a payment for the article to be kept. Might I ask you to forward the email and a summary of what has happened to the arbitration committee via their email, because I am aware of a similar claim. Please let me know below (or email me preferably) if you need any help. Thanks, Pahunkat (talk) 11:52, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

It's come up in a related discussion that you may want to contact the Wikimedia foundation legal department if you have evidence of a pay-to-keep-page extortion or threat. Their contact is legal@wikimedia.org . Georgewilliamherbert (talk) 13:04, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

Pahunkat and Georgewilliamherbert, thank you both for commenting. As mentioned before, when contacted about Mark’s page, we nor Mark made no payment to anyone. However, we’d like to bring what happened to the attention of those who might be able to do something about it, if only to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen to someone else. Is there any information we should include in our email aside from a description of what happened? WriteJames (talk) 22:52, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

Any emails or other contact you had off-wiki should be forwarded to Wikimedia Foundation legal email alias. If you can include all headers etc, that would help. If any contact related to the extortion or threats was made on Wikipedia, if you can identify where and when (a diff for a specific edit, or what page/talk page/by whom etc., send links to the diffs of those (or we can help find those, if you aren't familiar with identifying those easily). A narrative of what you thought was happening and when would probably help for context, but the most important parts will be the actual contact messages.

Thank you. Georgewilliamherbert (talk) 03:28, 9 February 2021 (UTC)