User talk:Ronyseamons

May 2020
Hello Ronyseamons. The nature of your edits, such as the one you made to User:Ronyseamons/sandbox, 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 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. 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:Ronyseamons. 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. creffett (talk) 16:49, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

Adding as employee
I'm an employee of a startup called AMPLYFI and would like to create a Wikipedia page for our company, like many others on the site. Am I allowed to do this as an employee? I appreciate I have to write neutral content and use as many references as possible which I've tried to do in the sandbox, am I doing the right thing? Ronyseamons (talk) 17:03, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
 * , if you are an employee of the company, you will need to disclose that relationship. You will also be expected to follow our conflict of interest editing guidelines - the highlights are that you will need to make your relationship clear, remain neutral, submit your article through the articles for creation process, and if your draft article is accepted you will be expected to make edit requests on the talk page of the article instead of editing it directly. I will post our standard welcome message for conflict-of-interest editors shortly to be sure that you have all of the resources you may need. creffett (talk) 17:32, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

Welcome!
Hello, Ronyseamons, and welcome to Wikipedia!&#32;Thank you for your contributions.

I noticed that one of the first articles you edited appears to be dealing with a topic with which you may have a conflict of interest. In other words, you may find it difficult to write about that topic in a neutral and objective way, because you are, work for, or represent, the subject of that article.&#32;Your recent contributions may have already been undone for this very reason.

To reduce the chances of your contributions being undone, you might like to draft your revised article before submission, and then ask me or another editor to proofread it. See our help page on userspace drafts for more details. If the page you created has already been deleted from Wikipedia, but you want to save the content from it to use for that draft, don't hesitate to ask anyone from this list and they will copy it to your user page.

One rule we do have in connection with conflicts of interest is that accounts used by more than one person will unfortunately be blocked from editing. Wikipedia generally does not allow editors to have usernames which imply that the account belongs to a company or corporation. If you have a username like this, you should request a change of username or create a new account. (A name that identifies the user as an individual within a given organization may be OK.)

In addition, if you receive, or expect to receive, compensation for any contribution you make, you must disclose your employer, client, and affiliation to comply with our terms of use and our policy on paid editing.

Here are some pages that you might find helpful:
 * The plain and simple conflict of interest guide
 * The five pillars of Wikipedia
 * Contributing to Wikipedia
 * Tutorial
 * How to edit a page and How to develop articles
 * How to create your first article (using the Article Wizard if you wish)
 * Simplified Manual of Style

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on talk pages using four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place  before the question. Again, welcome! creffett (talk) 17:32, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

Thank you, this information is very useful for a total novice like me. I'll certainly take up the offer of having a draft proof read before looking to publish. As an employee of the company, should I also disclose this somewhere prior to any publication? Thank you once again for your support Ronyseamons (talk) 21:07, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
 * , yes, you need to disclose. Instructions for how to do this are at WP:COI and WP:PAID. Please read them carefully, let us know if you have any questions. Girth Summit  (blether)  06:56, 18 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Hi - I just took a quick look at the contents of your sandbox. I have a couple of comments which might help you put together an acceptable draft.
 * Your tone is much too promotional. I am guessing that you have a background in marketing, and are used to producing copy in that sort of environment. Writing encyclopedic text is very different - you need to tone it down significantly. We write neutrally and informatively. Phrases like which specialises in delivering insights to businesses to help them to proactively plan for future challenges are far too jargony and buzzwordy - that should say something like 'provide business consultancy services'. part of the growing tech landscape in Cardiff should be 'based in Cardiff'. They work mainly in the finance sector, working alongside leading UK banks to offer new insights using big data becomes 'They work mainly in the finance sector'. Do you see what I mean?
 * Your sourcing will need to be much better to demonstrate that the company meets the notability requirements. Have you read WP:NCORP? That gives you an idea of what you're looking for. You need multiple sources that are independent, reliable and secondary, and which give the company significant coverage. Companies house isn't significant coverage, it's a routine listing that all companies have; the Tech Nation thing is an interview with the CEO - that's primary coverage; the Harvard report is interesting, but it doesn't really give them significant coverage, just two or three sentences mentioning one of their platforms, and it's probably not independent since they were involved in the study; the Global Banking and Finance piece is literally written by the CEO - that's not independent. So, none of these sources contribute towards notability. What you are looking for is independent coverage about the company itself, written by somebody who is entirely unconnected with them, in a reliable source. If you can't find sources like that, the article won't be accepted. You don't need many - three would be enough - but each of them has to tick all of the boxes. Cheers Girth Summit  (blether)  08:48, 18 May 2020 (UTC)

It's going to be difficult for us to find 3rd party sources as we're only a startup. I'll carry out further research to see if I can find sources that meet the criteria. I'll also revise the tone and make the content more factual - I'm not in marketing, I'm the COO but you're right in that I'm more used to writing promotional content for the company. Are there good examples of small companies you could direct me to so that I can follow a good template please? Ronyseamons (talk) 09:19, 18 May 2020 (UTC)
 * , if you're the COO then I assume you are paid by the company - I don't know whether you have read PAID yet, please be sure to do so because the requirements there form part of the terms of use of this site, you need to ensure you understand them thoroughly. Good articles about small companies are hard to come by, because sourcing is difficult to find - it might be that your company is not yet sufficiently notable to warrant an article. There is a list of good articles about businesses here, which would be worth looking at (but I expect they're mostly older and more established firms than yours is). Cheers Girth Summit  (blether)  09:58, 18 May 2020 (UTC)

Thank you, and yes from the research I've done prior to writing any content it seemed that mostly established companies had pages. I have read the PAID section and now added the PAID reference to my sandbox article - is this sufficient, or do I need to be even more explicit? Ronyseamons (talk) 10:08, 18 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Take a look at this part of the guidance. You've put the paid template in the article - that template should be put on your userpage. The template to put on the article is the 'Connected contributor (paid)' one. If you disclose on your user page, and on the article, you're good. Girth Summit  (blether)  10:39, 18 May 2020 (UTC)