User talk:Dgavel123

Hello Dgavel123. 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:Dgavel123. 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, do not edit further until you answer this message. Melcous (talk) 12:47, 23 July 2023 (UTC)


 * Hello. I apologize if I was violating the paid editing disclosure requirements. I was asked by Professor Stavins to create a Wikipedia bio page for him as I am a communications consultant working for him. So, Professor Stavins is my client and he is paying me my standard hourly fee for this project. The content that we propose including in the Wikipedia bio page is compiled from free publicly accessible Harvard University websites. Upon further investigation, it seems as if I should be drafting an "article for creation" rather than the page I have been working on. Please let me know if that is the best avenue for me to take. Please advise on what steps I can take to make it right. Dgavel123 (talk) 17:04, 23 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your reply and understanding. Yes, you should use the articles for creation process, and you also need to disclose that you are a paid editor - the starting point is to add the Paid-contribution disclosure to your user page. It is also worth noting that the page is not Stavins' "bio page", but rather is an encyclopedia article about him. Both you and he should make sure you understand that you have no ownership over such an article. You might like to read An article about yourself isn't necessarily a good thing. Finally, I would also note that the draft article in your sandbox contains a large number of external links within it - these will all need to be removed - they should either be internal links to other wikipedia articles, or references.  If you have more questions, please ask! Thanks Melcous (talk) 07:14, 24 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Melcous -- I appreciate your guidance. I will review all the materials you shared with me and will proceed forward from there. And yes, I realize that Wikipedia is a shared space and we certainly do not claim ownership over the article. I had the misimpression that a limited number of external links were allowed in Wikipedia articles, but if that is not the case, I will remove them and add the links as citations. Thank you. Dgavel123 (talk) 12:56, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

Sandbox draft
Hi Dgavel, thanks for your understanding above. I've had a look at User:Dgavel123/sandbox and would note that there are a number of issues that you will need to address before this would even be considered for acceptance. The following might help you: Thanks Melcous (talk) 23:46, 17 September 2023 (UTC)
 * External links (links to other websites) should not be used within the content of an article, so all of those should be removed
 * Content needs to be sourced to reliable independent secondary sources to be included - for example, the section early life and education has no sources at all - this information needs to be properly source or it should be removed
 * And most importantly, all content should be written using a neutral point of view (this is why editing with a conflict of interest can be so difficult). For example, including phrases like "Stavins has spent his entire academic career at the Harvard Kennedy School", or including a long list of links to journals without any independent commentary, using the honorifc "Professor", linking to a CV, and even commenting on how he likes to spend his free time are all the kinds of things a bio written by someone or for someone for their own purposes would do, but are not accepted in a neutral encyclopedia.


 * Melcous -- Thank you for the helpful feedback and for your patience. I have made the changes you recommend although I am unable to find reliable independent secondary sources for Mr. Stavins' educational degrees. (I see that many other personal pages also lack those citations.) I have removed all external links and unnecessary uses of the word 'professor' and I have edited the copy so that it reads in a neutral tone. I have also added additional citations. Please note that when I attempted to save these changes I received an error message reading, "Something went wrong: No stashed content found for 1175801117/8a93e083-5567-11ee-b475-d08e79f19976." Please advise.  Dgavel123 (talk) 17:33, 18 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Melcous -- I have since been able to make the edits as described above. You will notice that the article still contains some "External Links" at the bottom of the page. I can remove those if need be. Also, can you please tell me how I can move the info box to the upper right-hand corner of the page? Also, can I add two additional chunks of information to the infobox? ('Doctoral Advisers' and 'Doctoral Students') thank you. Dgavel123 (talk) 18:51, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

Dgavel123, if you ever want this to go live, consider undoing these edit. You are not, in fact, adding citations: you are adding links, primary and even spammy links, not citations. Please look up, as already suggested, what secondary sources are. I have given you some tips in my edit summaries, including this one--it's up to you to do something with them. I won't revert you, but the two edits you just made make it even more unlikely that the draft will be accepted. Also, I suggest you make a talk page for the draft and disclose your COI there, in the manner explained in the policy that was linked earlier. Drmies (talk) 23:34, 18 September 2023 (UTC)