User talk:K9shrink


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August 2010
Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia, your addition of one or more external links to the page Let's Adopt has been reverted. Your edit here was reverted by an automated bot that attempts to remove links which are discouraged per our external links guideline from Wikipedia. The external link you added or changed is on my list of links to remove and probably shouldn't be included in Wikipedia. I removed the following link(s): http://sharonyildiz.blogspot.com/2010/08/truth-about-ivan-lets-adopt.html. If the external link you inserted or changed was to a blog, forum, free web hosting service, fansite, or similar site (see 'Links to avoid', #11), then please check the information on the external site thoroughly. Note that such sites should probably not be linked to if they contain information that is in violation of the creator's copyright (see Linking to copyrighted works), or they are not written by a recognised, reliable source. Linking to sites that you are involved with is also strongly discouraged (see conflict of interest). If you were trying to insert an external link that does comply with our policies and guidelines, then please accept my creator's apologies and feel free to undo the bot's revert. However, if the link does not comply with our policies and guidelines, but your edit included other, constructive, changes to the article, feel free to make those changes again without re-adding the link. Please read Wikipedia's external links guideline for more information, and consult my list of frequently-reverted sites. For more information about me, see my FAQ page. Thanks! --XLinkBot (talk) 00:25, 13 August 2010 (UTC)

November 2016
Hello, I'm XLinkBot. I wanted to let you know that one or more external links you added to Vanishing bird cage have been removed because they seemed to be inappropriate for an encyclopedia. If you think I made a mistake, or if you have any questions, you can leave me a message on my talk page, or take a look at our guidelines about links. Your edit here to Vanishing bird cage was reverted by an automated bot that attempts to remove links which are discouraged per our external links guideline. The external link(s) you added or changed (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ5McQBmoFQ) is/are on my list of links to remove and probably shouldn't be included in Wikipedia. If the external link you inserted or changed was to a media file (e.g. a sound or video file) on an external server, then note that linking to such files may be subject to Wikipedia's copyright policy, as well as other parts of our external links guideline. If the information you linked to is indeed in violation of copyright, then such information should not be linked to. Please consider using our upload facility to upload a suitable media file, or consider linking to the original. If you were trying to insert an external link that does comply with our policies and guidelines, then please accept my creator's apologies and feel free to undo the bot's revert. However, if the link does not comply with our policies and guidelines, but your edit included other, constructive, changes to the article, feel free to make those changes again without re-adding the link. Please read Wikipedia's external links guideline for more information, and consult my list of frequently-reverted sites. For more information about me, see my FAQ page. Thanks! --XLinkBot (talk) 17:28, 24 November 2016 (UTC)

March 2023
Hello K9shrink. 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:K9shrink. 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) 17:52, 16 March 2023 (UTC)


 * Thank you for writing to alert me about this issue. I have added the requested disclosure. I've only made a few minor (unrelated to work) Wikipedia edits prior to this week, but I'm a huge Wikipedia fan and regular donor. I do not want to violate policy, so I would like to learn which edits I made that caused you to flag me and send me a note.
 * As some background: I've worked from home as a technical writer for DNASTAR for many years (mainly updating user guides), and had nothing to do with its Wikipedia presence until a few days ago. At that time, I was asked to update the entry "DNASTAR" and to update links, etc. in other Wikipedia articles that mention the company or software. There are a couple dozen instances on Wikipedia of links going to pages of our website that no longer exist, so I was asked to update those. (I believe all/most of these links were originally put in by third-parties, not by anybody at DNASTAR).
 * Before doing all the link updates, I thought I would update our only "dedicated" page on Wikipedia, DNASTAR. I read the Wiki pages about not writing promotional content and tried to follow this, but apparently failed. It would be helpful if you let me know which of the items below caused you to flag my edits:
 * 1) I slightly updated the main article, mainly rearranging existing sentences.
 * 2) I removed a couple of references to the company's own website and instead linked to third-party websites.
 * 3) I added a sentence to the "Reviews" section of an article in 2018 that reviewed both us and a competitor. I wrote (what I believe) is a neutral statement saying that the article discussed pros and cons of both applications.
 * 4) I noticed that there was only one reference under the "Customers" section, even though the software is used in thousands of universities alone. I checked and saw that our competitors were listing many customers on their own Wiki pages, so I added some more customer citations to that section of DNASTAR. I thought this would be okay, as I didn't put in any "marketing" language or customer reviews or anything. I just linked to (mainly) university website announcements that they have a site license for our software for faculty/student use.
 * 5) I understood the Wiki guidelines enough to know that I couldn't add articles about our individual software applications, but if somebody typed them in, they would turn up nothing. So I added redirects for our trademarked application names to go to DNASTAR.
 * MrOllie, Could you please let me know which of the numbered items above caused you to flag my edits? Thank you. K9shrink (talk) 15:43, 17 March 2023 (UTC)