Sarahtarney

Hello, Sarahtarney. 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 COI may be unduly influenced by their connection to the topic. Editing for the purpose of advertising or promotion is not permitted. 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, company, organization or competitors;
• propose changes on the talk pages of affected articles (see the {{request edit}} template);
• disclose your COI when discussing affected articles (see WP:DISCLOSE);
• 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 must disclose your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation (see WP:PAID).

Also please note that editing for the purpose of advertising, publicising, or promoting anyone or anything is not permitted. Thank you. Melcous (talk) 15:05, 12 January 2018 (UTC)

Reply

Hi Sarah, thanks for your message on my talk page and thank you for taking wikipedia's conflict of interest policies seriously. Because you work for Johns Hopkins, you should also read the policy on paid editing and make sure you comply with that. The two key elements are disclosure and review. So first, you should disclose your connections on your user page using the Template:Paid and also disclose your conflict in your edit summaries. And secondly, yes as you have said, rather than edit connected articles directly, you should propose things on the talk page using the Template:Request edit instead so that other editors can review them before changes are made. Please feel free to ask here if you have any other questions. Thanks, Melcous (talk) 22:55, 12 January 2018 (UTC)