User talk:Jtaylor22

February 2025

Hello Jtaylor22. 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 employed (or being compensated in any way) by a person, group, company or organization to promote their interests. Paid advocacy on Wikipedia must be disclosed even if you have not specifically been asked to edit Wikipedia. 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 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 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:Jtaylor22. The template {{Paid}} can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form: {{paid|user=Jtaylor22|employer=InsertName|client=InsertName}}. 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) 22:29, 11 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi! Thanks for your time working on Wikipedia. Long time reader & donor, first time editor. I am employed by the University of Illinois Gies College of Business - I'm a writer, and part of my job is to keep this page accurate. I will fill out the paid editing disclosure form, however, if I'm reading your message correctly it seems like I won't be allowed to continue working on this page since I am paid to do so. If that's the case - how do we (as the College) keep our page up-to-date if we are not allowed to update it? Is there a way I can run copy through some sort of system to ensure a neutral point of view? Thanks! Jtaylor22 (talk) 15:17, 12 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Content you added was copied from the school's website, and thus was a violation of Wikipedia's copyright policy. Please don't add copyright material to Wikipedia. Diannaa (talk) 15:31, 12 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

How do we add factual information about our College if it's not available outside of our website? Jtaylor22 (talk) 15:36, 12 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Should I instead just say "Gies College of Business has 9 research centers etc." and not link to their pages, so adding factual information without a citation that leads to our website? Just trying to find a solution that fits with the Wiki guidelines. Jtaylor22 (talk) 15:42, 12 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It starts with declaring the COI properly, as ElKevbo indicated, on your user page. Then, edits need to be neutral. Best practice is via an edit request (explained on and linked through the COI policy page); direct edits to the article are discourages unless, I suppose, they are purely neutral and well verified. Obviously claims like "one of the most highly utilized university finance labs in the US", sourced to the school itself, are not neutral and not well verified. Hope this helps. Drmies (talk) 15:46, 12 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you! Jtaylor22 (talk) 16:38, 12 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Now that I've declared the COI - there are a few edits that I believe still fit the guidelines but were reverted. Specifically, I changed the wordmark on the infobox to our most recent wordmark, and I added a bulleted list of our rankings with sources outside our College's website. Can these be added back to the page? Jtaylor22 (talk) 16:59, 12 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think that updating the existing (outdated) wordmark to the current one would be totally okay with most editors. But I think that many editors would not look favorably on a paid editor adding new rankings to the article as that could be viewed as promotional information. The safe approach is to post a request in the article's Talk page. ElKevbo (talk) 23:22, 12 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]