ProblemSolver321

Welcome!

Hello, Bascomcomm, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions, especially your edits to David Jolly. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:

• Introduction and Getting started
• Contributing to Wikipedia
• The five pillars of Wikipedia
• How to edit a page and How to develop articles
• How to create your first article
• Simplified Manual of Style

You may also want to take the Wikipedia Adventure, an interactive tour that will help you learn the basics of editing Wikipedia. You can visit The Teahouse to ask questions or seek help.

Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or , and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome! MBlaze Lightning (talk) 11:45, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

David Jolly

Greetings, We need to to make sure all content added can be attributed to a reliable source. I removed some of the content that you added that I didn't see mentioned in the sources provided. I also restored some content which was reliably sourced.CFredkin (talk) 22:30, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

David Jolly - Warning #2

Greetings, please refrain from editing David Jolly's wikipedia page. The David Jolly wikipedia page is results of years of editing and work done on behalf of wikipedia editors, not poltical candidates or consultants. It has come to our attention that this account represents a Florida political consulting firm for David Jolly. Wikipedia is a place for public knowledge and facts. It is not to be tampered with and 'scrubbed down' by a candidate who doesn't want people to know or see something about themselves. Please note, all future attempts will continue to be reverted, & everything on the page is well-cited and factual. Simply put, facts are facts. VisaBlack (talk) 03:42, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

• Also, it is worth pointing out that the more the COI editor edits here, the more press they will likely to get. For a communications company without a basic understanding of how Wikipedia works, you can end up doing a lot more harm than good. HappyValleyEditor (talk) 15:22, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

I'll note that if you are being paid to edit Wikipedia, according to our WP:Terms of Use, you need to declare the paid relationship on Wikipedia. Please see WP:PAID. Even if you are not being paid, but have a conflict of interest, you should make a declaration of the conflict of interest. Please see WP:COI. I will open a discussion at WP:Conflict of Interest Noticeboard, if one hasn't already been opened. You should check there and address the issues raised. Thanks. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 15:50, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Username issue

As this appears to be a corporate account for Bascom Communications & Consulting per this aticle, I am providing you notice that this username violates our username policy. It is likely to be indefinitely blocked on that account. Please see the notice below for options...

Welcome to Wikipedia. I noticed that your username, "Bascomcomm", may not comply with our username policy. Please note that you may not use a username that represents the name of a company, group, organization, product, or website. Examples of usernames that are not allowed include "XYZ Company", "MyWidgetsUSA.com", and "Foobar Museum of Art". However, you are invited to use a username that contains such a name if it identifies you personally, such as "Jack Smith at XYZ Company", "Mark at WidgetsUSA", or "FoobarFan87".

Please also note that Wikipedia does not allow accounts to be shared by multiple people, and that you may not advocate for or promote any company, group, organization, product, or website, regardless of your username. Moreover, I recommend that you read our conflict of interest guideline. If you are a single individual and are willing to contribute to Wikipedia in an unbiased manner, please create a new account or request a change of username, by completing this form, that complies with our username policy. If you believe that your username does not violate our policy, please leave a note here explaining why. Thank you. Jytdog (talk) 07:00, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

Thank you. We are in the process of changing our username.

Sorry, but there is a minor correction to be made, "changing our username" is incorrect. The username must be for a single individual. It cannot be a group account - 1 person only per account. Also if you are going to be doing paid editing, you *must* declare your paid status per WP:Terms of Use. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 19:59, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes, what Smallbones said is correct. Please reply and confirm that one human being will be using this account; if you do not we will again need to block this account. Once you do, we'll need to discuss conflict of interest and paid editing in Wikipedia; I'll open a new section for that. But one thing at a time. Please confirm that one person will use this account. Thanks. Jytdog (talk) 22:20, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Understood, thank you. Yes, one human will be using this account. — Preceding unsigned comment added by ProblemSolver321 (talk • contribs) 22:30, 8 April 2016 (UTC

Thanks for replying! Great. Quick note on the logistics of discussing things on Talk pages, which are essential for everything that happens here. In Talk page discussions, we "thread" comments by indenting - when you reply to someone, you put a colon ":" in front of your comment, and the WP software converts that into an indent; if the other person has indented once, then you indent twice by putting two colons "::" which the WP software converts into two indents, and when that gets ridiculous you reset back to the margin (or "outdent") by putting this {{od}} in front of your comment. This also allows you to make it clear if you are also responding to something that someone else responded to if there are more than two people in the discussion; in that case you would indent the same amount as the person just above you in the thread. I hope that all makes sense. And at the end of the comment, please "sign" by typing exactly four (not 3 or 5) tildas "~~~~" which the WP software converts into a date stamp and links to your talk and user pages. That is how we know who said what. I'll open a new section on COI/PAID editing in a moment, below... Jytdog (talk) 23:29, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

April 2016

Your account has been blocked from editing Wikipedia with this username. This is because your username, Bascomcomm, does not meet our username policy.

Your username is the only reason for this block. You are welcome to choose a new username (see below) and continue editing.

A username should not be promotional, related to a "real-world" group or organization, misleading, offensive or disruptive. Also, usernames may not end in the word "bot" unless the account is an approved bot account. 

You are encouraged to choose a new account name that meets our policy guidelines and create the account yourself. Alternatively, if you have already made edits and you wish to keep your existing contributions under a new name, then you may request a change in username by:

1. Adding {{unblock-un|your new username here}} on your user talk page. You should be able to do this even though you are blocked, as you can usually still edit your own talk page. If not, you may wish to contact the blocking administrator by clicking on "E-mail this user" on their talk page.
2. At an administrator's discretion, you may be unblocked for 24 hours to file a request.
3. Please note that you may only request a name that is not already in use, so please check here for a listing of already taken names. The account is created upon acceptance, thus do not try to create the new account before making the request for a name change. For more information, please see Wikipedia:Changing username.

If you think that you were blocked in error, you may appeal this block by adding below this notice the text {{unblock|Your reason here}}, but you should read our guide to appealing blocks first. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 06:51, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Conflict of interest and paid editing in Wikipedia

OK, ProblemSolver321. So I work on conflict of interest issues here in Wikipedia along with my regular editing. You've already received notice of our COI and PAID policies - I would just like to walk you through the process and explain the reasoning for it.

Wikipedia is a widely-used reference work and managing conflict of interest is essential for ensuring the integrity of Wikipedia and retaining the public's trust in it. As in academia, COI is managed here in two steps - disclosure and a form of peer review. Please note that there is no bar to being part of the Wikipedia community if you want to be involved in articles where you have a conflict of interest of that you are paid to work on; there are just some things we ask you to do (and if you are paid, some things you need to do).

I don't know if you are familiar with public scandals that COI editing have caused in the past... if you are not, please see:

• Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia (yes we actually have an article about it)
• Wikipedia:Statement on Wikipedia from participating communications firms

The Statement above grew out of two scandals that hit us ~2013. One was about a firm called Wiki-PR that offers Wikipedia editing services. The other was about Banc de Binary which offered $10,000 for editors to "fix" their page in the midst of other scandals they were having (which became a scandal itself). See this WSJ article which names the BdB scandal but not the other. The WSJ piece says "Throughout February and March, the Wikimedia community extensively discussed the issue of undisclosed paid editing, resulting in 320,000 words of discussion on the site and 6.3 million views of the proposal that is being adopted." It was actually a much longer time, and many more words. There is a good-sized chunk of the community that hates paid editing and expresses disdain for paid editors. Another big chunk says "content not contributors" and doesn't care if you are paid or not. So people talked and talked and talked, mostly at each other, and at the end of the day, we didn't ban paid editing. As a result, the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns this site, took some executive action and updated the Terms of Use, to at least require paid editors to disclose what they were doing. (See the last bolded item here) Then the WMF would have legal grounds to take action, if they wanted to, against people who didn't disclose that they were editing for pay, and who was paying them. The WMF actually sent a cease-and-desist order to Wiki-PR, with regard to the use of the Wikipedia name, due to their undisclosed paid editing.

That is the context that you are working in. My stance is that we need to help editors manage their COIs. We have gotten some great contributions from conflicted editors; I have also given hours and hours of my time to cleaning up after conflicted editors who wouldn't follow our procedure for managing COI.

What everybody cares about, is good, neutral point of view content. The thing about COI is that it causes bias. People with a COI tend to write crappy content, because they cannot see what they are actually doing (they always say they can; they are pretty much always wrong) If you don't believe me, I can show you diffs of people being either unbelievably blind to themselves, or lying. Really. People who come here with a COI often don't know about, and don't care about, the policies that govern content and behavior here. When we are done working through how people with a COI or who are PAID should do at a basic level, I would appreciate it if you would let me walk you through the basic policies and guidelines. But later....

Anyway, I wanted to make sure you were aware of all that.

So - disclosure is the most important, and first, step. There is a second step, but first things first. While I am not asking you to disclose your identity (anonymity is strictly protecting by our WP:OUTING policy) would you please disclose if you have some connection with the campaign of David Jolly or with a PR agency or the like? You can answer how ever you wish (giving personally identifying information or not), but if there is a connection, please disclose it. After you respond (and you can just reply below), we can talk through how to more formally make any disclosure you have, and then about the second step. Thanks. Jytdog (talk) 23:44, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

(btw, this may seem silly due to the username issue we already went through, but voluntary and explicit disclosure of relevant connections is best in Wikipedia on a bunch of different levels. It's a process thing. Thanks. Jytdog (talk) 03:41, 9 April 2016 (UTC))