Ornithologistics

February 2021

Hello Ornithologistics. The nature of your edits, such as the one you made to Ecovillage, 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:Ornithologistics. The template {{Paid}} can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form: {{paid|user=Ornithologistics|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. [1] MrOllie (talk) 17:30, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

Managing a conflict of interest

Hello, Ornithologistics. 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. Pahunkat (talk) 20:46, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

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Hi, I have tried to follow your suggestions. As I wrote in response to Mr. Ollie, I am not being, have not been, and will not be compensated for editing a Wikipedia page. I answered this on my User talk page as well. I was doing this voluntarily, and made additional changes in response to what appeared to be the requests that had been posted on the page (and previously, another request that someone sent me). However, I am confused because now it seems as if I shouldn't have followed those suggestions. So I hope what I've done is OK but if my attempts to make things a little more accurate are not helpful or welcome then I will consider it a lesson learned and move on. As you can probably tell, I'm somewhat Wikipedia-ignorant aside from consulting it sometimes and donating some money to it. I hope I've done what you've requested satisfactorily and hope the info I've posted can stay, but I realize I may still be misunderstanding. Thanks. Ornithologistics (talk) 21:07, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

Ornithologistics, that's fine, but do take a moment to review the policies above for conflict of interest editing :-) Pahunkat (talk) 21:38, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for your messages. I don't expect to be editing much but this is helpful info. Ornithologistics (talk) 22:54, 28 February 2021 (UTC)