User talk:Mpostiy

May 2011
Hi. Welcome to Wikipedia. I noticed your first edit was to repeat the deletion of information from our article on California Coast University that was also deleted twice yesterday from IP address 173.51.113.111. For that reason, and based on my use of certain publicly available software facilities that are freely available on the internet, it seems possible to me that this account is affiliated with that IP address, and that the both the IP address and this account may have some connection to the school itself.

If that's the case, then I'd strongly suggest you refrain from editing this article, as you would appear to have a conflict of interest. If you were to explicitly disclose that conflict of interest on the article's talk/discussion page, you would be permitted to suggest changes to the article there.

If you do in fact have an undisclosed connection to the school, perhaps you'll value a little friendly advice. In such a case I'd suggest that it would be best to refrain from editing the article not only to adhere to Wikipedia's conflict of interest policies, but also for the strictly pragmatic reason that it is often possible using publicly available tools and methods to determine whether an organization is attempting to modify the Wikipedia page about itself. When members of the press, for example, have used those tools and discovered such attempts undertaken by other organizations, it generally turns out to be rather embarrassing for the organization involved, and any negative information that was attempted to be suppressed by that means usually ends up gaining even broader exposure than would have otherwise been the case.

I'll close by saying that I'm just another volunteer editor here, like yourself, with no official authority whatever, and that I offer this advice only on my own initiative: I certainly don't speak in any way for Wikipedia. Nevertheless, if you do have a connection to the school, I'd reiterate that it's almost certainly not in the best interests of your organization, in my opinion, to attempt to modify the CCU article. Best regards, –  OhioStandard  (talk) 02:43, 20 May 2011 (UTC)