User talk:LB at FatFace

March 2022

Hello, I'm 331dot. I wanted to let you know that one or more of your recent contributions to Fat Face have been undone because they appeared to be promotional. Advertising and using Wikipedia as a "soapbox" are against Wikipedia policy and not permitted; Wikipedia articles should be written objectively, using independent sources, and from a neutral perspective. Take a look at the welcome page to learn more about Wikipedia. Thank you. 331dot (talk) 15:38, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Hello FFDCE. 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:FFDCE. The template {{Paid}} can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form: {{paid|user=FFDCE|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. 331dot (talk) 15:39, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Hi 331dot. Thank you for your messages.

The company which is the subject of the article, FatFace, is my employer, and I was asked to bring the page up to date with supplied content. I can only apologise for not complying with Wikipedia's policy around these kind of edits; I am usually only responsible for content on our own websites and I am not familiar with Wikipedia. Per your advice above, I assume the disclosure on my user page should therefore state 'FatFace' as both employer and client?

The edits I was asked to make are predominantly objective (regarding change of ownership, Chief Executive, & Non-Executive Chairman), with a few changes to remove or update references accordingly, and ideally to replace the image in the article with another, supplied by the company (as the pictured store is now closed). I assume that it was the more brand-focused messaging supplied for the introduction that was deemed non-compliant, and I am happy to re-write this to be purely objective - although it would be helpful to know if any of the other changes were deemed promotional and should be avoided. Is this discussion that could/should take place on the Talk page for the article?

If I propose changes via the Talk page for the article, and they are considered acceptable, will I then be allowed to make the agreed changes, or will this still have to be carried out by another editor?

Many thanks (and apologies again!) FFDCE (talk) 16:15, 29 March 2022 (UTC)