User talk:Kenosplit

Welcome!

Hello, Kenosplit, and welcome to Wikipedia. We appreciate encyclopedic contributions, but some of your recent contributions seem to be advertising or for promotional purposes. Wikipedia does not allow advertising. For more information on this, please see:

• Policy on neutral point of view
• Guideline on spam
• Guideline on external links
• Guideline on conflict of interest
• FAQ for Organizations

If you still have questions, there is a new contributors' help page, or you can . You may also find the following pages useful for a general introduction to Wikipedia:

• The five pillars of Wikipedia
• How to edit a page and how to develop articles
• Help pages
• Tutorial
• Article wizard for creating new articles
• Simplified Manual of Style

I hope you enjoy editing Wikipedia! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. Feel free to write a note on the bottom of my talk page if you want to get in touch with me. Again, welcome! Lwarrenwiki (talk) 20:42, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

A more personal welcome

@Kenosplit: As you might have guessed, the previous message was a standardized Wikipedia template. In my own words, this time: welcome to Wikipedia. Please continue our conversation either on my talk page, or if appropriate, at Talk:Machine Zone. Lwarrenwiki (talk) 20:42, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Notice of Conflict of interest noticeboard discussion

This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard regarding a possible conflict of interest incident in which you may be involved. Thank you. Lwarrenwiki (talk) 22:02, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Conflict of interest in Wikipedia

Hi Kenosplit I work on conflict of interest issues here in Wikipedia. Thanks for disclosing that you work at Machine Zone here. I'm providing you with more formal notice of our COI guideline and paid editing policy, and will have some comments and questions for you below. Please do reply here, below my comments.

Hello, Kenosplit. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places or things you have written about on Wikipedia, you may have a conflict of interest (COI). Editors with a COI may be unduly influenced by their connection to the topic. See the conflict of interest guideline and FAQ for organizations for more information. In particular, please:

• avoid editing or creating articles related to you and your circle, your organization, its competitors, projects or products;
• instead propose changes on the talk pages of affected articles (see the {{request edit}} template);
• when discussing affected articles, disclose your COI (see WP:DISCLOSE);
• avoid linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see WP:SPAM);
• exercise great caution so that you do not violate Wikipedia's content policies.

In addition, you must disclose your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation (see WP:PAID).

Please familiarize yourself with relevant policies and guidelines, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, sourcing and autobiographies. Thank you.

Comments and requests

Wikipedia is a widely-used reference work and managing conflict of interest is essential for ensuring the integrity of Wikipedia and retaining the public's trust in it. As in academia, COI is managed here in two steps - disclosure and a form of peer review. Please note that there is no bar to being part of the Wikipedia community if you want to be involved in articles where you have a conflict of interest; there are just some things we ask you to do (and if you are paid, some things you need to do).

Disclosure is the most important, and first, step. You've done that at another user's talk page, and that editor added a template to the article Talk page.

To finish the disclosure piece, would you please add the disclosure to your user page (which is User:Kenosplit - a redlink, because you haven't written anything there yet)? Just something simple like: "I work for Machine Zone and have a conflict of interest with regard to that topic" would be fine. If you want to add anything else there that is relevant to what you want to do in WP feel free to add it, but nothing promotional about the company (see WP:USERPAGE for guidance if you like).

That would finish the the disclosure piece.

As I noted above, there are two pieces to COI management in WP. The first is disclosure. The second is what I call "peer review". This piece may seem a bit strange to you at first, but if you think about it, it will make sense. In Wikipedia, editors can immediately publish their work, with no intervening publisher or standard peer review -- you can just create an article, click save, and viola there is a new article, and you can go into any article, make changes, click save, and done. No intermediary - no publisher, no "editors" as that term is used in the real world.

What we ask editors to do who have a COI and want to work on articles where their COI is relevant, is a) if you want to create an article relevant to a COI you have, create the article as a draft, disclose your COI on the Talk page using the appropriate template, and then submit the draft article through the WP:AFC process so it can be reviewed before it publishes; and b) And if you want to change content in any existing article on a topic where you have a COI, we ask you to propose content on the Talk page for others to review and implement before it goes live, instead of doing it directly yourself. You can make the edit request easily - and provide notice to the community of your request - by using the "edit request" function as described in the conflict of interest guideline. A section has been added to the beige box at the top of the Talk page at Talk:Machine Zone - there is a link at "click here" in that section -- if you click that, the Wikipedia software will automatically format a section in which you can make your request.

By following those "peer review" processes, editors with a COI can contribute where they have a COI, and the integrity of WP can be protected. We get some great contributions that way, when conflicted editors take the time to understand what kinds of proposals are OK under the content policies. (which I will say more about, if you want).

I hope that makes sense to you, and that you will stop editing the article directly.

I want to add here that per the WP:COI guideline, if you want to directly update simple, uncontroversial facts (for example, correcting the facts about where the company has offices) you can do that directly in the article, without making an edit request on the Talk page. Just be sure to always cite a reliable source for the information you change, and make sure it is simple, factual, uncontroversial content.

Will you please agree to follow the peer review processes going forward, when you want to work on the Machine Zone article or any article where your COI is relevant? Do let me know, and if anything above doesn't make sense I would be happy to discuss. And if you want me to quickly go over the content policies, I can do that. Just let me know. Thanks! Jytdog (talk) 16:54, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

• @Jytdog: Thank you for the message. I understand Wikipedia's guidelines but don't believe I violated them in anyway, and it certainly was not my intention to violate them. Your changes to the "Machine Zone" article, however, have completely done away with basic facts about the company. Most of the changes you made were not even to text I wrote -- they were written by Lwarrenwiki, who is not a Machine Zone employee and has no apparent bias in trying to promote the company. Your changes to the Machine Zone article were extreme and only make the article inaccurate and antiquated. It ignores anything about the company beyond summer of 2015. Isn't the purpose of Wikipedia to offer accurate, up-to-date information? That was my only intent in making edits to the article -- not to promote the company, but to offer more up-to-date information about the company. I would simply like the article to be more accurate and hope that we can work together to achieve that.