User talk:Silverstonem5

Mandatory paid editing disclosure
Hello Silverstonem5. The nature of your edits 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:Silverstonem5. 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. ~Anachronist (talk) 17:53, 9 October 2021 (UTC)


 * Dear Anachronist, I have no financial stake in Sonifi or any business related to Sonifi or to any of the businesses to which I provided links in the edit. I used to work at LodgeNet many years ago and was only trying to help clear up the history of the company for the sake of preservation. I read all the guidelines for posting, and thought linking provided credibility. As I thought about it, maybe instead of links, they should have been cites. That is presuming they were allowable and credible reference sites. If I was a paid advocate, I wouldn’t edit their post without a disclosure. I am just trying to help out.


 * Thank you for responding.
 * LinkedIn would not work as a citation either. We want citations to reliable sources that are independent of the topic. A LinkedIn page is not independent, it was created by a person associated with the company. The same is true for press releases and company websites.
 * I put the message above on your talk page not due to the linking, but due to the prose you wrote that did not cite any independent sources, indicating that you are privy to the knowledge you wrote about, and that is an indication of paid editing or at the very least a conflict of interest. ~Anachronist (talk) 15:03, 11 October 2021 (UTC)


 * Dear Anachronist, again, please accept my apologies for the mistakes. It was a first post. Again, if being a former employee is a conflict of interest and demonstrates that I am privy to knowledge, that even the public may, could, or should be aware, but may not be, then I may have a conflict. But there is no paid editing, regardless of the perception. I have subsequently read the Help:Getting started and the Overview tutorials intro. I didn’t see the Help:Getting started email until after my first post. I will continue to get educated. The prose I write in the future will cite independent sources. I understand that a LinkedIn page is not independent because was created by a person associated with the company. May I draft some further edits for review?Silverstonem5 (talk) 19:45, 12 October 2021 (UTC)


 * If you have a conflict of interest, you should propose changes on the article's talk page, where others can evaluate them. Even without a conflict of interest, you can propose changes on the talk page if you are uneasy about editing in the article. Editors with a conflict of interest can make minor corrections to spelling, grammar, numbers, names, they can add citations to reliable independent sources, and they can revert obvious vandalism, but anything more substantive should be proposed on the talk page. The proposal can be prefaced with a request edit tag to cause the request to be listed on a category page that is monitored by some editors. WP:COI has guidance.


 * If your employment was far in the past and you feel you don't have a conflict of interest, go ahead and make changes. However, anything you add should be verifiable by citations to published secondary sources. The sources don't have to be online, they don't have to be free, but they should be reasonably accessible (like in a library) to anyone wanting to verify a statement in the article. You can also cite primary sources (like the company's own website) for repeating statements that the company says about itself, with proper attribution to the company. Reliable sources has details about what constitutes a reliable source. ~Anachronist (talk) 22:48, 12 October 2021 (UTC)


 * Dear Anachronist, thank you for your feedback, that is very helpful. As I read through all the educational materials to understand what is a reliable source, I am still a bit confused. You mentioned "LinkedIn would not work as a citation either. We want citations to reliable sources that are independent of the topic. A LinkedIn page is not independent, it was created by a person associated with the company.”


 * I recently reviewed the Wikipedia Page for Dermot Kennedy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dermot_Kennedy The very first CITE on his page is from his personal Instagram page. This would appear to be User-generated content. From Wikipedia Reliable Sources page "Content from websites whose content is largely user-generated is generally unacceptable.” This is the CITE "Dermot Kennedy on Instagram: "Yesterday was my birthday, and so today I've been thinking about this year and everything that's happened. I've toured the world multiple..."". Instagram. Retrieved 21 January 2019.


 * He is the source of his own birthdate. We know that female actresses and even male actors routinely lie about their age. There is no reason to think Dermot lied here. But is is reliable to use the actual person as the source of their birthdate?


 * Is this an example of something that probably shouldn’t have been used as a CITE or are there gray areas on this topic?Silverstonem5 (talk) 14:44, 13 October 2021 (UTC)


 * There are millions of poorly-sourced statements on Wikipedia. I have removed the birth date from Dermot Kennedy. The source failed to verify the year of birth. The relevant content policy pertaining to living persons is WP:BLP.
 * Absent a secondary source, one could write that the subject "gives her date of birth as ....", which attributes the claim to the subject rather than simply stating the date of birth as a fact in Wikipedia's narrative voice. If the date of birth isn't relevant to the article topic, such as naming the CEO in an an article about a company, then it's best to omit it.
 * That said, it is OK to use primary sources to verify facts about what a subject says about itself. For example, a company website or quarterly earnings report may list the names of its executives. It would be fine to use such sources to name the executives in a Wikipedia article, in Wikipedia's voice, because it is understood that such information would normally come from the company. ~Anachronist (talk) 16:38, 13 October 2021 (UTC)