User talk:PBStrait for LCPA

COI Issue
Hello, Lee County Port Authority. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places or things you have written about in the page Southwest Florida International Airport, 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 or competitors;
 * propose changes on the talk pages of affected articles (you can use the request edit template);
 * disclose your conflict of interest when discussing affected articles (see Conflict of interest);
 * avoid linking to your organization's website in other articles (see WP:Spam);
 * 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.--Bhockey10 (talk) 18:29, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

Hello Lee County Port Authority. The nature of your edits gives the impression you have an undisclosed financial stake in promoting a topic, such as the edit you made to Page Field, 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 egregious type of COI; the Wikimedia Foundation regards it as a "black hat" practice akin to black-hat SEO.

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, and if it does not, 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:Lee County Port Authority. 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. --Bhockey10 (talk) 18:42, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

COI Username
Welcome to Wikipedia. I noticed that your username, "Lee County Port Authority", may not comply with our username policy. Please note that you may not use a username that represents the name of a company, group, organization, product, service, or website. Examples of usernames that are not allowed include "XYZ Company", "MyWidgetsUSA.com", and "Foobar Museum of Art". However, you are permitted to use a username that contains such a name if it identifies you individually, such as "Sara Smith at XYZ Company", "Mark at WidgetsUSA", or "FoobarFan87".

Please also note that Wikipedia does not allow accounts to be shared by multiple people, and that you may not advocate for or promote any company, group, organization, product, service, or website, regardless of your username. Please also read our paid editing policy and our conflict of interest guideline. If you are a single individual and are willing to contribute to Wikipedia in an unbiased manner, please request a change of username, by completing the form at Special:GlobalRenameRequest, choosing a username that complies with our username policy. If you believe that your username does not violate our policy, please leave a note here explaining why. Thank you. --Bhockey10 (talk) 18:31, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

January 2020
There have been two problems with this account: the account has been used for advertising or promotion, which is contrary to the purpose of Wikipedia, and your username indicates that the account represents a business or other organisation or group or a web site, which is also against policy, as an account must be for just one person. Because of those problems, the account has been blocked indefinitely from editing. Additionally, if you receive, or expect to receive, compensation for your contributions to Wikipedia, you must disclose who is paying you to edit.

If you intend to make useful contributions about some topic other than your business or organisation, you may request an unblock. To do so, post the text at the bottom of your talk page. Replace the text "Your proposed new username" with a new username you are willing to use. See Special:CentralAuth to search for available usernames. Your new username will need to meet our username policy. Replace the text "Your reason here" with your reason to be unblocked. In that reason, you must:
 * Convince us that you understand the reason for your block and that you will not repeat the kind of edits for which you were blocked.
 * Describe in general terms the contributions that you intend to make if you are unblocked.

If you believe this block was made in error, you may appeal this block. To do so, please read the guide to appealing blocks, then add the text at the bottom of your talk page, replace the text "Your reason here" with your reason for thinking that the block was an error, and publish the page. 331dot (talk) 19:11, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

Until today, this account had not been used in almost 11 years, yet you say you have edited in the past(and I assume others from your agency). Please clarify this(someone else will actually review your request). 331dot (talk) 22:32, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

Please also review conflict of interest and paid editing and explain how your future edits will be consistent with these policies. Please also understand that Wikipedia is primarily interested in what independent reliable sources state, not what an article subject wants to say about itself. 331dot (talk) 22:34, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

JBW (talk),Thank you for taking the time to review my appeal. After reading through the Wikipedia policies over the past few days, I had very little hope the account would be unblocked. I understand you are required to uphold the policies that have been set in place and recognize where the conflict lies with my case. However, I do need to follow up so I can assure my supervisors I have exhausted all the options for getting updates made to these pages. Since the account is blocked indefinitely, should it just be deleted? Should I bother to change the username at this point? Are there any alternative options to submitting proposed changes to the two airport pages referenced above and having them posted if they are approved? Or is this the final decision with no other options? Thank you. Sincerely, PBS Lee County Port Authority (talk) 15:01, 31 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Accounts cannot be deleted, only abandoned. Note that the block notice states "If you intend to make useful contributions about some topic other than your business or organisation, you may request an unblock." So far you've only indicated that you want to edit about your organization and its operations. If you want to be an individual, general contributor, please tell what subjects unrelated to your conflict of interest you want to edit about. If you want to edit about other things, you can make formal edit requests on article talk pages when wanting to contribute about things related to your conflict of interest. If you you are only here to represent your agency, it's unlikely that you will be unblocked, in my opinion. Feel free to show your superiors this page. 331dot (talk) 15:42, 31 January 2020 (UTC)


 * Personally, I would be willing to consider an unblock if you (1) offer an acceptable replacement user name, and (2) indicate that you have read the guideline on conflict of interest and that you will follow its recommendations, including making requests for other editors to make changes to relevant articles, rather than making the changes yourself. However, I have found over the years that I am more favourable to unblocking than most administrators, and I do not wish to make unblocks which may be way out of line with consensus, so if other administrators express disagreement with me I often have to accept that. On this occasion, you have been blocked by, who apparently reads the conflict of interest guideline differently from how I do. Provided you comply with that guideline I do not see any reason why you need to edit on other topics in order to be allowed to suggest changes to articles where that guideline applies. (It is true that the block notice above says "If you intend to make useful contributions about some topic other than your business or organisation...", but that is not part of any policy or guideline, so far as I know. The current wording of that notice is only very slightly modified from a notice that I wrote some years ago for my personal use, and it was perhaps careless of me to include that wording, which I copied from a version written by another editor over 10 years ago.) may like to comment on what I have now said.  JBW (talk) 16:08, 31 January 2020 (UTC)


 * It would not be appropriate for me to use this as an individual account to contribute to other pages or topics. This really was a work-related task and a way to get information updated for the organization's airports on Wikipedia. I'd agree to offering a replacement username, following the recommendations from the COI guideline (I have now read the entire article.) and making requests for other editors to make changes, if there is a consensus that the account would be unblock. Thank you again. PBS Lee County Port Authority (talk) 16:40, 31 January 2020 (UTC)
 * This is already an individual account- yours; accounts are not for organizations or positions. Any other persons at your agency who wish to edit will need their own accounts. The account simply needs an acceptable username. I'm quite content with your good judgement even if we have differing interpretations of policy. I would prefer that the user be a general contributor, but as long as they don't directly make COI edits I'm okay here. Please do not consider me to be standing in the way of any action you wish to take, with my best wishes. 331dot (talk) 17:53, 31 January 2020 (UTC)


 * Hi and  although not an admin, I'm an experienced user and one day would like admin status. I don't want to butt in but as the user who first brought up the COI issues I would like to add a few points. JBW's reason for declining the unblock request was correct- Although not malicious edits, the edits were a mix of statistic updates and promotional style additions.  Although COI users can often make noncontroversial edits, the majority of the stats updates were unreferenced so there's no accuracy 3rd party citation. As an example, without citation, a COI user could report an accurate increase of 10 widgets or inaccurately update an article to say 1000 widgets. JBW's unblock proposal is perfectly acceptable. Step 1) A name change along with the required COI notice on the userpage. Step 2) I get from the user's REs that they don't have a full grasp of COI guidelines yet but if they change the name along with following those guidelines, an unblock is fine. Step 3) They would need to follow COI guidelines such as the user proposing larger edits on the airport's talk page while updating stats/small noncontroverial edits. As long as those small edits are cited properly in 3rd party, I believe that's satisfies the COI issue.Bhockey10 (talk) 19:15, 31 January 2020 (UTC)
 * : As you rightly say, you sare an experienced editor, having been here for almost 12 years and made well over 10,000 edits, and although not being an administrator means that you can't actually close the unblock request, you are just as capable of expressing a view about it as any administrator.
 * : What you say reads more like willingness to acquiesce in my decision than agreement with it, but either way you have indicated that you are willing to accept it, so I shall go ahead on that basis. Thank you for considering what I have said, and responding to it.
 * Editor "Lee County Port Authority": The fact which gives me greatest pause over accepting your unblock request is that you seem still not to have fully understood the fact that a Wikipedia account is not the property of a business. "It would not be appropriate for me to use this as an individual account to contribute to other pages or topics" is missing the point: if you are the only person to have used this account then it is your account, and your employers have no more authority over it than they have over my account. You may choose not to use the account for other editing, but that is a very different matter. How a Wikipedia account may or may not be used is for Wikipedia to decide, not the Lee County Port Authority. If, on the other hand, you are not the only person to have used this account, and it has been used by one or more other people on behalf of your employer, then you should not continue editing from this account at all, but you may request to be allowed to create a new account for yourself.
 * Despite that, I am willing to unblock your account, on the basis of your assurances about following the COI guideline. I will go ahead when you have offered an acceptable new user name. The unblock will be on the understanding that you will not make edits to articles related to your employer, but will instead request edits on the corresponding talk pages, using Request edit to call attention to your request.
 * Finally, my apologies for the fact that this is so complex and bureaucratic. Partly this is because unfortunately it is necessary to be vigilant, because of a lot of people who come to Wikipedia and edit disruptively. For example, the kind of thing that Bhockey10 mentions about claiming 1000 widgets instead of 10 is not just a hypothetical possibility: it really does go on all the time, and innocent users get caught in the collateral damage caused by our checks and restrictions to prevent that kind of dishonesty. However, the complexity is also, in my opinion, made much worse by the fact that Wikipedia has far too many guidelines and policies, and almost every one of them is far longer and more complex than it needs to be. My personal opinion is that the single worst change that has happened to Wikipedia over the years is a continuous drift away from having just a few simple guidelines outlining general principles towards having a complex legalistic attempt to cover every detail. However, that is how it is, and whether you or I like it or not, that is the framework in which we have to work. JBW (talk) 20:13, 31 January 2020 (UTC)
 * I understand the account is unique to me and I am the sole user of that account. However, the email address attached to the account belongs to my employer. I've been assigned this email address by my employer. I am the sole user of the email address. It is unique to me and me alone, but I use it knowing I represent my employer/organization, which is a government entity in the state of Florida, USA. We have very broad sunshine laws, so nearly everything we do is subject to public record. It is because of the email address attached to my wikipedia account that I said it wouldn't be appropriate for me to edit on other topics. We are not suppose to use our work email account for anything that could be deemed personal. Does that make sense? When I created the account it was as assigned work. I never had the intention to use it for any other purpose other than work. Hindsight is always 20/20. I really do appreciate all the time everyone has spent explaining the guidelines and rules for me and this situation. I'd like to offer a new username of PBStrait for LCPA, please let me know if this is acceptable. Thank you again for your time. Lee County Port Authority (talk) 21:16, 31 January 2020 (UTC)
 * I'll let JBW handle this, but you can easily change your email address in your Preferences to a non-work email address. 331dot (talk) 21:35, 31 January 2020 (UTC)


 * On the basis of the above discussion,  I have unblocked your account, and renamed it from "Lee County Port Authority" to "PBStrait for LCPA". JBW (talk) 22:53, 31 January 2020 (UTC)