User talk:Wbjeffries

January 2023
Hello Wbjeffries. 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:Wbjeffries. 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. ElKevbo (talk) 00:40, 20 January 2023 (UTC)


 * Hello, I am the Vice Dean for Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine. During a faculty meeting it was brought to my attention that our school has a Wikipedia page, and that the page contained some seriously outdated information, which could lead readers to think that we had a longitudinal integrated clerkship structure (which we don't) and that all of our campuses were not listed there.  I joined as an editor and replaced the information with factual, not promotional information.  The text I wrote references publicly available material that accurately describes our curriculum and campus structure.  Your conflict of interest policy confuses me, in that although I am clearly not being paid to edit this or any other Wikipedia page, and do not financially benefit from correcting a page created by others, I am in fact paid by this school as Vice Dean and it might be construed that I have a financial conflict of interest.  So, do I, in Wikipedia's opinion, have a conflict of interest?  If so, I will need to understand how to edit my user page, since the templates provided all imply that I am being paid to edit this page.  Thanks - WB Jeffries, PhD Wbjeffries (talk) 16:44, 20 January 2023 (UTC)


 * As an employee of the school, you definitely have a conflict of interest. It's not a negative judgement or a red mark of shame; we all have conflicts of interest. I have one with my own employer.
 * You are welcome - encouraged! - to request and suggest changes in the article's Talk page. Many editors are also okay with COI editors making edits that are unquestionably uncontroversial e.g., updating existing information in the article. But it's generally a good idea to avoid making substantive edits to the article and stick to editing its Talk page.
 * If you make a request in Talk and don't get a timely response, feel free to drop me a note on my User Talk page. Or you can drop a quick note at WT:UNI where you can ask for help from other editors who have an interest in college and university articles. ElKevbo (talk) 22:29, 20 January 2023 (UTC)