User talk:Vanessa Branson

Managing a conflict of interest
Hello, Vanessa Branson. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places or things you have written about in the page Vanessa Branson, 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, company, organization or competitors;
 * propose changes on the talk pages of affected articles (see the request edit template);
 * disclose your conflict of interest when discussing affected articles (see WP:DISCLOSE);
 * 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 must 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 WP:PAID).

Also please note that editing for the purpose of advertising, publicising, or promoting anyone or anything is not permitted. Thank you. bonadea contributions talk 12:19, 12 February 2019 (UTC)


 * reply *****

Please can you explain the conflict of interest when we are just stating facts. If she received an investigature (knighthood) from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, that is a fact, not a conflict of interest. She is no longer co-owns Eilean Shona with her ex-husband, it is owned solely by her. That is a fact. I will make a couple amendments and hope that you approve them.

February 2019
Please do not add or change content, as you did at Vanessa Branson, without citing a reliable source. Please review the guidelines at Citing sources and take this opportunity to add references to the article. Thank you. bonadea contributions talk 20:38, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

Please note - you should not edit the article about yourself directly (nor any other article about anybody or anything where you have a conflict of interest). Use the article talk page at Talk:Vanessa Branson and suggest your edits there. Don't forget to provide reliable secondary sources for any information you want to add. Thank you. --bonadea contributions talk 20:40, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

April 2020
Please stop your disruptive editing. If you continue to add promotional or advertising material to Wikipedia, as you did at Vanessa Branson, you may be blocked from editing. ''

Once again, please do not edit the article Vanessa Branson directly. Use the talk page, Talk:Vanessa Branson, to suggest edits. If you add the template to the talk page and then write your request below it, your request will be listed on a page where uninvolved editors can see it, and act on it. bonadea'' contributions talk 15:47, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

I didn't realise that putting down a fact - my book is published in one month was disruptive. It's a fact, it's happening. It's not self-published but through a publisher. How else do you update an entry without facts? I am not trying to be disruptive but you have come down really hard on a minor edit that states a fact. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Vanessa Branson (talk • contribs) 15:52, 14 April 2020 (UTC)


 * As described above, you add the code to the talk page and then write your request below it. The only reason for you personally to edit the Wikipedia article about you would be if it had been blatantly vandalised, and if that should happen you need to be very clear in the edit summary about what you are doing in the edit. For anything else, please use the talk page. As for the forthcoming book, that is not encyclopedic information unless secondary sources have reported on it – once it has been published, it will presumably be reviewed, for instance. I'm sorry for being so blunt about it, but there are two notes above, from 2019, asking you to please use the talk page and not add anything to the article yourself. Regards, --bonadea contributions talk 16:05, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

Ok I understand, I thought we were able to edit content directly. I will submit the information when it is published and have an outside secondary source for you to see. I don't see why you have to be so aggressive. I'm not a wikipedia expert, I am just trying to have correct information about myself in the public domain. I am not trying to be misleading or break any laws. It's just an information site that I have supported over the years.

addition to Vanessa Branson's wikipedia page
Please can you add an amendment to Vanessa Branson's wikipedia page in the Awards and recognitions section. The full section is below:

Awards and recognitions In October 2014, Vanessa Branson was awarded the Royal distinction of Officer of the Order of Ouissam Alaouite, at the occasion of the ceremony inaugurating the Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rabat for her contributions to Moroccan Arts and Culture.

She is a trustee of the British Moroccan Society,[5] and The Leila Alaoui Foundation, as well as a trustee for Virgin Unite. She is on the board of trustees of Global Diversity Foundation and on the board of Area9 Lyceum. She is also a patron of Hammersley Homes Charity.

Branson's memoir, One Hundred Summers, was published in May 2020.[6]


 * Please follow the relevant links in the template provided to you three years ago and read the relevant policy. Edit suggestions need to be make on the article talk page. You also never formally declared your conflict of interest; I have done so on the article talk page. Drmies (talk) 14:23, 11 April 2022 (UTC)


 * Hi Drmies
 * I'm not sure what conflict of interest we have? If Vanessa is on the board or a patron of a charity, that exists as a fact. We are not promoting the charity/business, just stating her involvement. We have to declare this interest in her tax and with other board positions so that everything is transparent. Please advise what is allowed as it is confusing on Wikipedia. If Vanessa cannot update her wikipedia page, is it up to another individual to do it? As her assistant, can I do it? What are the parameters?
 * thank you Vanessa Branson (talk) 14:55, 12 April 2022 (UTC)
 * I didn't see this because I wasn't alerted; please see Help:Notifications. But there are other issues there, and I'll ping, with whom you've communicated. You speak in the first person plural, so there is clearly a conflict of interest which you are yet to disclose, and in addition Wikipedia accounts are for one person, so there really can be no "we". You are her assistant? That's great, but you CAN NOT have an account named for a well-known person when you are not that well-known person. And I also sense another misunderstanding, which suggests you did not read the policy you were linked to three years ago. And at the time you said, "Please can you explain the conflict of interest when we are just stating facts"--"stating facts" isn't that simple, as the discussion at the Help Desk indicated (and gave one good example of how it's not simple). In addition, "conflict of interest" doesn't necessarily entail a financial interest, and it doesn't have to mean "promoting the charity/business". If you are employed by the subject of the article, you obviously have a conflict of interest. And if you get paid for that you certainly also have a financial interest.So aside from the matter of article content, which I am not going to discuss here since other editors have done that already, I simply cannot let you (in the singular or the plural) edit under this user name. The template below will tell you what kinds of names are acceptable, and how you can change it. You also really need to read WP:COI and act accordingly, or you will not be able to edit the article, or perhaps edit here at all. Sorry, but on this website we have to play by certain rules. Thank you. Drmies (talk) 14:39, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

August 2022
This account has been blocked indefinitely from editing Wikipedia because the username, Vanessa Branson, matches the name of a well-known, living person.

If you are the person represented by this username, please note that the practice of blocking such usernames is to protect you from being impersonated, not to discourage you from editing Wikipedia. You may choose to edit under a new username (see information below), but keep in mind that you are welcome to continue to edit under this username.

If you choose to keep your current username, please send an email to info-enwikimedia.org including your real name and your Wikipedia username to receive instructions from our volunteer response team about account verification. Please do not send documentation without being requested to do so.

If you are not the person represented by this username, you are welcome to choose a new username (see below).

A username should not be promotional, related to a "real-world" group or organization, misleading, offensive, or disruptive. Also, usernames may not end in the word "bot" unless the account is an approved bot account.

You are encouraged to choose a new account name that meets our username policy guidelines and create the account yourself. Alternatively, if you wish for your existing contributions to carry over under a new name, then you may request a change in username by:
 * Adding below. You should be able to do this even though you are blocked. If not, you may wish to contact the blocking administrator by clicking on "Email this user" from their talk page.
 * At an administrator's discretion, you may be unblocked for 24 hours to file a change of name request.
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Appeals: If, after reading the guide to appealing blocks you believe you were blocked in error, then you may appeal this block by adding below this notice. Drmies (talk) 14:39, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

If you get unblocked
Two things: First, another Wikipedia article cannot be used as a reference. I don't think anyone made that clear to you in relation to the Order of Ouissam Alaouite. Second, the term "COI" can be confusing. If someone serves on a board, they are (probably) not in conflict with that board. However, there can be a conflict between 1) Wikipedia's requirement to have neutrally written articles based entirely on verifiable, published sources, and 2) the extreme difficulty of any person to write about themselves or their company, and base that entirely on what the published sources say, while carefully omitting everything that they "know" but which is unsourced. All while writing neutrally instead of "positively", and also including detrimental information in the draft if it is relevant.

That's why we want disinterested editors to write articles about people and companies. The disinterested editor will use what's in the sources, while the subject of an article (or an employee or owner of a company) will "know too much" and write stuff that's unsourced. 71.228.112.175 (talk) 07:13, 27 August 2022 (UTC)