Angie-at-JaxStateWeb

August 2023

Hello Angie-at-JaxStateWeb. 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:Angie-at-JaxStateWeb. The template {{Paid}} can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form: {{paid|user=Angie-at-JaxStateWeb|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) 22:20, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

Hi, ElKevbo,

Thank you for reaching out. I was not aware that I was violating the terms of use. While I am an employee of Jacksonville State University in the Web Services Department, I was not attempting to promote or otherwise elevate JSU's reputation in Wikipedia; rather, I was asked by our VP of Advancement to correct an incorrect amount that was listed for our endowment. I don't see how correcting inaccurate information goes against the goal of Wikipedia.

I will use the mandatory disclosure to my user page as requested. I tried to make my identity clear through the use of an obvious username choice. Thank you for your assistance.

Best,

Angie Ray

Assistant Webmaster

Jacksonville State University

(Angie-at-JaxStateWeb) Angie-at-JaxStateWeb (talk) 13:39, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

Thank you Angie for your cooperation. It is instinctive for us to have concerns with any editor that has a conflict of interest, which is why the preformatted message above mentions promotional editing. While your edit was not promotional in nature, it did delete sourced information. We prefer that you propose changes to the article about Jacksonville State University by using edit requests. That gives the opportunity for neutral editors to evaluate the proposed changes, and then either publish them or suggest revisions. --Drm310 🍁 (talk) 14:18, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

Hello, I'm AirshipJungleman29. I noticed that you added or changed content in an article, Jacksonville State University, but you didn't provide a reliable source. It's been removed and archived in the page history for now, but if you'd like to include a citation and re-add it, please do so. You can have a look at referencing for beginners. If you think I made a mistake, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Thank you. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 14:05, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

Thank you! I have brought the lack of citation up with our VP for Advancement. When I have it, I will resubmit. Thanks for your patience! Angie-at-JaxStateWeb (talk) 14:25, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

Please don't edit the article about your employer. You're welcome to request and suggest edits in the article's Talk page. But you have a clear, strong conflict of interest so you should be editing the article except to make the most uncontroversial edits supported by good references. ElKevbo (talk) 02:27, 11 August 2023 (UTC)