Latest comment: 4 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello, Amandaebrophy! Welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. You may benefit from following some of the links below, which will help you get the most out of Wikipedia. If you have any questions you can ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking or by typing four tildes "~~~~"; this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you are already excited about Wikipedia, you might want to consider being "adopted" by a more experienced editor or joining a WikiProject to collaborate with others in creating and improving articles of your interest. Click here for a directory of all the WikiProjects. Finally, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field when making edits to pages. Happy editing! ShadowWarfare (talk) 14:44, 17 July 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Hello Amandaebrophy. The nature of your edits, such as the one you made to Wikipedia:Help desk, 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 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. 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:Amandaebrophy. The template {{Paid}} can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form: {{paid|user=Amandaebrophy|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. YorkshireLad ✿ (talk)22:36, 17 July 2020 (UTC)Reply
Hi I am not being paid for this. Is it not possible to change someone's photo?
Hi, just to clarify: regardless of whether you're being paid for any specific contributions, you'd count as a WP:PAID editor if you work for the subject in any way, including as their representative, and would need to comply with the policy I've just linked. In a similar way, anyone editing about (say) the organisation they work for would count as a paid editor.
As for the technical question: as was explained at the Help Desk, not to that photo, no. Wikipedia doesn't have the rights to use it, for a start, and would not pay to acquire them; moreover, it is against Wikipedia's image-use policy to use images that are under "all rights reserved" licences (like the one you suggest changing to), since Wikipedia content should as far as possible be freely reusable by others (even if the Wikimedia Foundation, who own the site, paid for a licence to use the image, that wouldn't cover subsequent re-use). If you know the person who took that image, and they're willing to upload it to Wikipedia's sister site, Wikimedia Commons, then it could be used—but in uploading it, the photographer would be granting the right to anyone to freely use it for any purpose, which might reduce the income they can get from licensing it on Getty Images. If the photographer does go down this route, you could request at the article's talk page that the image be changed (though, if you are the subject's agent or similar, you'd need to make the paid-editing declaration first, like I said).
I hope this answers your question. (PS: If you post anywhere that's not in an article, you should add ~~~~ after whatever you type, so that it adds your signature. :-) ) YorkshireLad ✿ (talk)22:59, 17 July 2020 (UTC)Reply
Your account has been blocked indefinitely for advertising or promotion and violating the Wikimedia Foundation's Terms of Use. This is because you have been making promotional edits to topics in which you have an undisclosed financial stake, yet you have failed to adhere to the mandatory paid editing disclosure requirements. Paid advocacy is a form of conflict of interest (COI) editing which involves being compensated by a person, group, company or organization to use Wikipedia to promote their interests. Undisclosed paid advocacy is strictly prohibited. Using this site for advertising or promotion is contrary to the purpose of Wikipedia.
If you think there are good reasons why you should be unblocked, please read our guide to appealing blocks to understand more about unblock requests, and then add the text {{unblock|reason=your reason here ~~~~}} at the end of your user talk page. For that request to be considered, you must:
Confirm that you have read and understand the Terms of Use and paid editing disclosure requirements.
State clearly how you are being compensated for your edits, and describe any affiliation or conflict of interest you might have with the subjects you have written about.
Describe how you intend to edit such topics in the future.
This user's unblock request has been reviewed by an administrator, who declined the request. Other administrators may also review this block, but should not override the decision without good reason (see the blocking policy).
I created a Wikipedia account today and used it for the very first time. I asked for a photo of my client to be updated, not knowing Wikipedia has COI or Paid rules. When I first saw the rules, I did not believe I was violating them because I am not being paid to make this specific change directly by my client. I started getting a ton of messages from users and because this is my first time using Wikipedia I did not know how to reply to them. Instead, I updated my message because it was the only way I knew how to respond and I stated that I was not being paid, again, because I did not believe I was violating the rules. After reviewing them, I understand now that I needed to specify that I would count as a paid editor. I will no longer be making any changes but I would like for my account to be unblocked so I can apologize to the editors who tried to help me. I would also like to remove my name from any applicable area as my personal information is on there and I do not want it out for the world to see. Please help me with this.
Decline reason:
No point in unblocking, since you say you don't intend to make any edits to Wikipedia. If you want to apologise to anyone, you can do it here, using the {{ping}} template. Salvio 17:01, 16 August 2020 (UTC)
If you want to make any further unblock requests, please read the guide to appealing blocks first, then use the {{unblock}} template again. If you make too many unconvincing or disruptive unblock requests, you may be prevented from editing this page until your block has expired. Do not remove this unblock review while you are blocked.
Amanda still wants to remove her identifying information from everywhere it appears, and the experienced editors I've talked to (ArbCom members past and present, etc.) by and large don't see any reason we should enable her to avoid the consequences of her actions globally. I'd be good with unblocking her to make apologies, and to go forth and sin no more (so to speak), but with the clear understanding that she will NOT be allowed to remove her name, her employer, etc. from any place where it already appears due to her own actions and has not been removed by an admin. --Orange Mike | Talk18:00, 20 July 2020 (UTC)Reply
