Jonathan W. Hickman

Welcome

Hello Jonathan W. Hickman and welcome to Wikipedia! I am Ukexpat and I would like to thank you for your contributions.

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ukexpat (talk) 20:18, 22 February 2010 (UTC)

Some friendly advice

Hello Mr. Hickman,

I saw your request for assistance that was already addressed, but after reviewing some of the issues regarding your site I thought I should pop by and offer some advice. I see that references linking to your site have been introduced by several editors, all of whom have been blocked or received warnings for COI issues. The problems seem to fall into two broad categories:

• Understanding of reliability and verifiability. Your comments, and those of other editors supporting the inclusion of links to your site, suggest that the fact that those links have been around on Wikipedia for awhile, or that other review sites are used as references, should be sufficient. You can't point to use in Wikipedia as a reason to use it in Wikipedia - that sort of argument will be summarily dismissed.
• Conflict of interest. No one who works for your company has any business adding any information about your company or from your company to an article ever. If the world really believes your site is a good source for this type of news, then editors who have no connection to your site will start adding links to it.

I know this is all information you've been given before, but I wanted you to understand two more facts as you continue to learn about Wikipedia:

1. All links from Wikipedia are "nofollow," which means that they do not help your search engine results in the slightest.
2. Sites which are identified as being a source of "refspam" may be blacklisted, meaning all links will be removed and no more may be added, ever. This happened to a site that I occasionally contribute writing to. In that case, the writers for that content site were looking to drive traffic to their own articles, because they earned money based on page views. As you no doubt can see, this was a conflict of interest on a very wide scale. The site appears to have a similar level of editorial control to yours ("control" being a very important word, too; at both sites writers can publish without an editor approving it first, which goes to the reliability standard), and now it cannot ever have a link from Wikipedia in any form ever again. This could happen to your site, if you do not restrain your team from adding further links.

I am making no judgments about the reliability of the information on your site - I am just letting you know that past practice has been to block editors and sites first to protect Wikipedia from spam. The practices I've observed could very well lead to further actions by administrators, and I don't think you want that.

I would be happy to talk to you further about how to constructively add to Wikipedia, but I believe you're already familiar with WP:BESTCOI, so please only contact me if you're prepared to follow those practices.--~TPW 15:44, 2 March 2010 (UTC)