Maketimus

Managing a conflict of interest

Hello, Maketimus. 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 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. Adoring nanny (talk) 15:14, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

Maketimus, you are invited to the Teahouse!

Hi Maketimus! Thanks for contributing to Wikipedia. Be our guest at the Teahouse! The Teahouse is a friendly space where new editors can ask questions about contributing to Wikipedia and get help from experienced editors like Jtmorgan (talk). Visit the Teahouse We hope to see you there! Delivered by HostBot on behalf of the Teahouse hosts 16:02, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

April 2021

It appears that you have been canvassing—leaving messages on a biased choice of users' talk pages to notify them of an ongoing community decision, debate, or vote. While friendly notices are allowed, they should be limited and nonpartisan in distribution and should reflect a neutral point of view. Please do not post notices which are indiscriminately cross-posted, which espouse a certain point of view or side of a debate, or which are selectively sent only to those who are believed to hold the same opinion as you. Remember to respect Wikipedia's principle of consensus-building by allowing decisions to reflect the prevailing opinion among the community at large. Thank you. Padgriffin (talk) 14:12, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

appearance of paid editing at MacKeeper

Hello Maketimus. The nature of your edits, such as the one you made to MacKeeper, 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:Maketimus. The template {{Paid}} can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form: {{paid|user=Maketimus|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. Adoring nanny (talk) 01:51, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

Various matters relating to your editing

I see that you have, unfortunately, already been in some degree of conflict in connection with the small amount of editing you have done so far. I hope that this doesn't put you off continuing to edit, and there are a few things that I will say in the hope that they may help you to better understand some of the matters involved, and perhaps help you to avoid future problems.

1. You have posted identical messages, pinging other editors, to several talk pages. I don't know what you hoped to achieve by that, since presumably if an editor saw one of the pings they would also have seen the others. However, whatever your purpose may have been, the effect is to waste editors' time by getting them to follow up several messages which all turn out to be the same. Also, it may lead to editors ignoring future messages from you. In any case, please don't do it.
2. At least some of the material you have posted into articles has been copied from other web sites. It is almost never suitable to copy content from another web site to Wikipedia, for more than one reason, the most important being copyright. When you post anything to Wikipedia you release it for anyone in the world to reuse it, either unchanged or modified in any way whatever, subject to attribution to Wikipedia. It is very rare that the owner of a web site licenses content for such very free reuse, and in those few occasions when they do so, we require proof of the fact. We don't assume that content is freely licensed on the unsubstantiated say so of just anyone who comes along and creates a Wikipedia account.
3. Much of your editing has given the appearance of been designed to give a good impression of the subjects you have written about, whether by adding copy giving such a good impression or by removing copy which is critical of the subjects. Wikipedia policy is that article content should be written from a neutral point of view, and should reflect what published third party independent reliable sources say. That includes commentary which may be uncomplimentary to the subjects of the articles. It also excludes material produced by people with an interest in selling a product. It doesn't look to me as though the promotional nature of your editing is because you are editing with a conflict of interest, as Adoring nanny has suggested, but whether you are or not doesn't make a lot of difference: promotional editing is unacceptable whatever the reason for it.
4. On more than one article you have repeatedly posted the same, or substantially the same, material following removal of the material you have posted or or changes to it. Such repeatedly pushing your own preferred version, known as "edit warring", is unhelpful. If it were allowed to continue without any check, the consequence would simply be that the most stubborn editor would always eventually get their way. That would obviously not be a good way of settling disagreements, and therefore editors who persist in edit warring may be blocked from editing by administrators. Instead of edit warring, explain the reasons why you believe your version to be best on the relevant talk pages, and be willing to discuss the issues, with a view to trying to reach agreement. (None of your talk page posts so far have attempted to do that: they have just made complaints and accusations against editors with whom you disagree.)

I hope that these comments may be of some help to you, and I suggest that you think about them carefully. You are welcome to ask me if you need any clarification of any of what I have said. JBW (talk) 21:18, 16 April 2021 (UTC)