JohnMcElhenny

November 2020

Hello JohnMcElhenny. 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:JohnMcElhenny. The template {{Paid}} can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form: {{paid|user=JohnMcElhenny|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) 17:25, 6 November 2020 (UTC)

Hello ElKevbo, Thank you very much for your note and suggestion, which I have followed -- I used the template and posted the mandatory disclosure to my user page, that I am employed by Bentley University. — Preceding unsigned comment added by JohnMcElhenny (talk • contribs) 12:37, November 6, 2020 (UTC)

Thanks! Please be sure to read our policy about conflicts of interest, too. In brief, we strongly discourage editors from directly editing articles about subjects to which they are connected; instead, you are encouraged to ask other editors to make or consider making edits in the article's Talk page. ElKevbo (talk) 19:33, 6 November 2020 (UTC)

Thank you very much for the guidance, ElKevbo. It has been extremely helpful. I understand and am reading the conflict of interest page now. — Preceding unsigned comment added by JohnMcElhenny (talk • contribs) 15:01, November 6, 2020 (UTC)