User talk:Blueandgreyslate

Conflict of interest in Wikipedia
Hi Blueandgreyslate. I work on conflict of interest issues here in Wikipedia, along with my regular editing, which is mostly about health and medicine. Your edits to date are promotional for Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect. I'm giving you notice of our Conflict of Interest guideline and Terms of Use, and will have some comments and requests for you below.

Hello, Blueandgreyslate. 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, and it is important when editing Wikipedia articles that such connections be completely transparent. See the conflict of interest guideline and FAQ for organizations for more information. In particular, we ask that you please:


 * avoid editing or creating articles related to you and your family, friends, school, company, club, or organization, as well as any competing companies' projects or products;
 * instead, you are encouraged to propose changes on the Talk pages of affected article(s) (see the request edit template);
 * when discussing affected articles, disclose your COI (see WP:DISCLOSE);
 * avoid linking to the Wikipedia article or to the website of your organization in other articles (see WP:SPAM);
 * exercise great caution so that you do not violate Wikipedia's content policies.

In addition, you must 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 WP:PAID).

Please take a few moments to read and review Wikipedia's policies regarding conflicts of interest, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, sourcing and autobiographies.

Also please note that editing for the purpose of advertising, publicising, or promoting anyone or anything is not permitted. Thank you.

Comments and requests
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; there are just some things we ask you to do (and if you are paid, some things you need to do).

Disclosure is the most important, and first, step. 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 Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, directly or through a third party (e.g. a PR agency, freelancing site, 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), I can walk you through how the "peer review" part happens and then, if you like, I can provide you with some more general orientation as to how this place works. Please reply here, just below, to keep the discussion in one place. Thanks! Jytdog (talk) 15:59, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

Your recent edit
This edit is problematic in the following ways:

1. You marked a substantial edit as "minor." You made substantive changes.

2. Your edit summary was inaccurate. You did more than update the article.

3. Your edit was not constructive and was promotional in nature.

4. Since you clearly have a conflict of interest, you should not be directly editing this article.

Please stop. Thanks for your cooperation. Coretheapple (talk) 18:20, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

Mandatory paid editing disclosure
Hello Blueandgreyslate. The nature of your edits gives the impression you have an undisclosed financial stake in promoting a topic, and that 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 egregious type of COI; the Wikimedia Foundation regards it as a "black hat" practice akin to Black hat SEO.

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, and if it does not, 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:Blueandgreyslate. The template Paid can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form:. 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, please do not edit further until you answer this message. Jytdog (talk) 19:28, 16 October 2018 (UTC)

Hi User:Jytdog. I appreciate your concern about promotional content or worse, about paid contributors. I am not a paid contributor and the edits today were in no way intended to be promotional in nature, but rather informational in providing an update on recent publicity concerning Facebook. As you know, controversial content is an issue that Facebook has been contending with, and there were several recent news articles that highlighted some recent struggles. These were relevant to the Anne Frank Center, thus my additions. I marked it as a "minor" edit because it was restricted to that issue. I am open to your suggestions for how best to incorporate this information. Thank you. --Blueandgreyslate (talk) 20:00, 16 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Please describe your relationship to the organization. Jytdog (talk) 21:27, 16 October 2018 (UTC)

I have an interest in many social issues and the nonprofit organizations that attempt to address them, especially through education. I have followed the Anne Frank Center, as well as numerous other charities, for many years, as a donor, volunteer, and interested citizen. I am not a paid editor, nor am I compensated in any way. I am, however, familiar with some recent news relevant to this page, which is why I've submitted the edits. Thank you. --Blueandgreyslate (talk) 13:07, 17 October 2018 (UTC)

I can understand your concern and thank you for taking your oversight seriously, Blueandgreyslate (talk) 13:12, 17 October 2018 (UTC)

User:Jytdog and User:Figureofnine, could you please remove the warning boxes that have been added to the top of the Anne Frank Center page? Thank you. --Blueandgreyslate (talk) 13:16, 18 October 2018 (UTC)
 * You dodged the question. No, am not removing the tags; you have edited exactly like a PR person would. This was terrible. Jytdog (talk) 14:44, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

User:Jytdog I am flattered, but I assure you I am not a professional PR person. You asked if I am a paid editor. I answered you honestly that I am not and I described to you as you requested my relationship with the organization. I did not "dodge" your question but told you I am a donor and volunteer, thus answering to the extent I can without disclosing my own identity (I understand that Wikipedia is supposed to respect anonymity). You have no evidence that I am a paid contributor -- because there is none, because I am not. I acknowledged that I can understand why you might perceive there to be a conflict of interest, so I'll go so far as to say it would be reasonable for me to suggest page edits for contributors such as yourself to make. What isn't reasonable to is punish a nonprofit organization for my well-intentioned efforts by slapping false accusations across the top of their page. (Honestly, I may be educated and be capable of writing but if I were a professional PR person I would be way better at this, have more experience editing, and most definitely would have seen the messages you sent to my profile page long before two days ago!) If there are factual errors on the page, they should be corrected. But there are external sources for most of the content, so the reliance on self-published sources looks like it's minimal, and the accusation of paid editing is unwarranted and blatantly false.

Look, we're at a place where you've done your best to monitor something and make an informed guess, but you happen to be incorrect. We both want the same thing. We want facts on a neutral page. How can we move forward? What's it going to take to remove those awful warnings? Thank you. --Blueandgreyslate (talk) 22:31, 18 October 2018 (UTC)
 * I asked you "Please describe your relationship to the organization." I am sort of willing to accept that you are not paid, but on the other hand, I have had many, many conversations with company employees sent to WP to edit who started out saying "I am not being paid", and then when asked the "any connection" question, disclose that they are an employee or on the board or something, and then when I ask if they are doing this as part of their work for the organization they say "yes" and so geez, yes, that is what we mean by paid editing.  Your edits are so blatantly PR-like that nothing you say really matters at this point.  People lie or misdirect all the time.  The proof is in the pudding and again your actual edits have nothing -- not a single thing -- to do with the mission of Wikipedia and everything to do with serving the organization.  You show no awareness that this is not an appropriate use of editing privileges.  To date you have been what we call not here to build an encyclopedia, but rather here to do PR. I will not be replying further. If you edit the article directly again in such a terrible way I will seek an indefinite block, based on your edits to date. Jytdog (talk) 22:36, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

Jytdog I really do understand where you're coming from and in your situation I might draw the same conclusions. My very first edits to the page, as you've seen, were to help balance some incredibly negative and biased content that had been on the page, especially once it was in the past, which I saw exactly as Wikipedia's mission of building an informational encyclopedia. I came here completely voluntarily, not in any formal capacity or at anyone's request. Actually, so much of that negative content remains that it almost looks like someone with an axe to grind was paid to make the organization look more controversial than it is.

I am aware of and owned up to the "conflict of interest" concerns and offered to make further edit suggestions rather than edit directly myself. Since most of even my most innocuous edits have been removed as of today, can you or User:Figureofnine please remove the "undisclosed payments" warning on the page? You said you won't reply further, but I am writing you in earnest with a reasonable request on behalf of an organization that you're harming because of my missteps. Thank you. --Blueandgreyslate (talk) 23:35, 18 October 2018 (UTC)