User talk:Nathaniel.hams

Hello Nathaniel.hams. The nature of your edits, such as the one you made to Igor J. Koralnik, 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:Nathaniel.hams. 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) 23:37, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

Reply
Hi Nathaniel, and thanks for your message on my talk page. As you work at the institution, I think you would be considered a paid editor and should ensure you are complying with that policy. Either way, you definitely have a conflict of interest here and so those policies also apply. In a nutshell, it doesn't mean you cannot be involved, but you need to disclose and allow review. So there are a couple of things you should do from here: If you have further questions, please ask - you can do that here if it's easiest. Thanks, Melcous (talk) 23:46, 24 May 2021 (UTC)
 * 1) Read through WP:PAID and WP:COI so you understand what is required
 * 2) Make a disclosure on your user page and/or the article's talk page
 * 3) Rather than editing the article again, if there are changes you would like to suggest, do this on the article's talk page, most simply done using the Edit request wizard