User talk:Joseph Lewin

An extended welcome
Welcome to Wikipedia. I've added a welcome message to the top of this page that gives a great deal of information about Wikipedia. I hope you find it useful.

Additionally, I hope you don't mind if I share some of my thoughts on starting out as a new editor on Wikipedia: If I could get editors in your situation to follow just one piece of advice, it would be this: Learn Wikipedia by working only on non-contentious topics until you have a feel for the normal editing process and the policies that usually come up when editing casually. You'll find editing to be fun, easy, and rewarding. The rare disputes are resolved quickly and easily.

Working on biographical information about living persons is far more difficult. Wikipedia's Biographies of living persons policy requires strict adherence to multiple content policies, and applies to all information about living persons including talk pages.

If you have a relationship with the topics you want to edit, then you will need to review Wikipedia's Conflict of interest policy, which may require you to disclose your relationship and restrict your editing depending upon how you are affiliated with the subject matter.

Some topic areas within Wikipedia have special editing restrictions that apply to all editors. It's best to avoid these topics until you are extremely familiar with all relevant policies and guidelines.

I hope you find some useful information in all this, and welcome again. --Ronz (talk) 16:39, 14 January 2018 (UTC)

November 2020
Hello Joseph Lewin. 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:Joseph Lewin. 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. MrOllie (talk) 22:32, 24 November 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for letting me know about the disclosure, I added it to my page. I do work for the company that produced the infographic. However, I have spent a great deal of time researching this topic and believe that the infographic adds value to the page. I would not have posted it unless it improves the value of the page by giving a visual explanation of a complicated topic.

Joseph Lewin (talk) 23:08, 24 November 2020 (UTC)


 * We don't display images that contain advertisements (or really any credits or watermarks at all). - MrOllie (talk) 23:12, 24 November 2020 (UTC)


 * That makes sense. I will avoid that in the future. Thanks again for the help. - Joseph Lewin (talk) 23:14, 24 November 2020 (UTC)