User talk:Martin Howard

Conflict of interest
Hello, Martin Howard. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places or things you have written about on the page Typewriter, you may have a conflict of interest (COI). Editors with a conflict of interest may be unduly influenced by their connection to the topic. 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, colleagues, company, organization, clients, or competitors;
 * propose changes on the talk pages of affected articles (you can use the edit COI template);
 * disclose your conflict of interest when discussing affected articles (see );
 * avoid linking to your organization's website in other articles (see );
 * do your best to comply with Wikipedia's content policies.

In addition, you are required by the Wikimedia Foundation's terms of use to 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 Paid-contribution disclosure.

Also, editing for the purpose of advertising, publicising, or promoting anyone or anything is not permitted. Thank you. 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 16:18, 10 December 2023 (UTC)


 * Hello,
 * Would you please consider my external link to my collection of early typewriters. My collection is not for sale but as one of the largest collections of its kind, my website contains much visual and historical information about the world's first typewriters. Thank you for your kind consideration. Martin Howard Martin Howard (talk) 16:38, 10 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Please study the conflict of interest policy carefully. You must declare your interest. You must not yourself add a link to your website. You may post a message at the talk page asking editors to consider whether the article would benefit from including it. BUT the policy WP:ELNO says that an external link may only be added if it contains essential information that cannot reasonably be expected to be in the article. 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 23:44, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

December 2023
Hello, I'm S0091. I wanted to let you know that one or more external links you added 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. Thank you. S0091 (talk) 22:35, 10 December 2023 (UTC)


 * and if you continue to add self-promotional links to your own website despite the 'conflict of interest' warning I gave you already today, you may expect to lose editing privileges. 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 23:15, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

Please stop. If you continue to add inappropriate external links to Wikipedia, as you did at Blickensderfer typewriter, you may be blocked from editing. It is considered spamming and Wikipedia is not a vehicle for advertising or promotion. Because Wikipedia uses nofollow tags, additions of links to Wikipedia will not alter search engine rankings. S0091 (talk) 20:41, 12 December 2023 (UTC)


 * It seems Martin Howard is an expert in this field. Can we AGF and help him be constructive?
 * @Martin Howard here's my advice:
 * 1. you can upload your images to wikicommons for use on wikipedia and
 * 2. only use your website as a reference or citation when appropriate. avoid external links in the body
 * 3. I also recommend adding this template to your User page to make the COI explicit:
 * it'll look like this:
 * context: i'm a relatively new wiki user and was following the California Typewriter page after updating Herbert Permillion Tonymetz 💬  21:12, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
 * see how to disclose coi and understand coi Tonymetz  💬  21:29, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
 * see how to disclose coi and understand coi Tonymetz  💬  21:29, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

March 2024
You may be blocked from editing without further warning the next time you insert a spam link. Persistent spammers may have their websites blacklisted, preventing anyone from linking to them from all Wikimedia sites as well as potentially being penalized by search engines. Adding your website as an image caption is not any better. MrOllie (talk) 01:01, 27 March 2024 (UTC)


 * May I use my typewriter images with the attribution 'Martin Howard Collection'?
 * I will no longer use my website as a part of the attribution.
 * Will this be fine?
 * Thank you,
 * Martin Howard Martin Howard (talk) 01:11, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
 * No. Wikipedia does not attribute images in captions in that way. If you want to contribute images, that's fine, and users who click through to the image page at the Commons project will see who uploaded it, but you should not be adding these all over Wikipedia. You should not be adding your name, your collections name, or any variation of such to any Wikipedia article in any format. MrOllie (talk) 01:23, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Ok thanks, that is clear.
 * So if someone clicks through to the image page at the Commons, what will they see about who (me) uploaded it?
 * Thank you,
 * Martin 70.50.81.246 (talk) 01:26, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Yes. You should also keep in mind that by uploading these images, you are granting anyone and everyone a license to do almost anything with them. They could put them in a coffee table book, or print them on T-shirts and sell them. MrOllie (talk) 01:27, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Ok, I will use a few typewriter images with the correct captions, without any personal information. Thanks for pointing out these images will be available for anyone to use.
 * With appreciation, Martin 70.50.81.246 (talk) 01:30, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Marking edits as minor
Hi Martin Howard! I noticed that you recently marked an edit as minor that may not have been. "Minor edit" has a very specific definition on Wikipedia—it refers only to superficial edits that could never be the subject of a dispute, such as typo corrections or reverting obvious vandalism. Any edit that changes the meaning of an article is not a minor edit, even if it only concerns a single word. Thank you. Just plain Bill (talk) 19:14, 27 March 2024 (UTC)


 * Thank you for explaining this to me. I will provide a better, more detailed, description when doing further edits beyond a minor edit. Martin Howard (talk) 19:19, 27 March 2024 (UTC)