User talk:BGirST

DISCLOSURE: I own stock in Vaxart, but am not getting paid. I have no affiliation to this company other than being an investor in this publicly traded company. ==

January 2022

Hello BGirST. The nature of your edits, such as the one you made to Vaxart, 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:BGirST. The template {{Paid}} can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form: {{paid|user=BGirST|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. – NJD-DE (talk) 19:16, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

In response, I am not being paid anything, as you can probably tell I am not very experienced with Wikipedia. While I do own stock in this company, no one is paying me and updating a picture of their HQ is not promoting anything but where the Headquarters are. I am part of the discussion on Stocktwits, where other users suggested that someone should update their employees to reflect 95 employees.

Your edits are unacceptable, and your personal attack against another editor is also unacceptable. If you persist in either, you risk being blocked.--Bbb23 (talk) 19:40, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

My apologies, if I am not being paid, but am an investor, what disclosure form is required to continue making edits?

No disclosure form. You simply can't make promotional edits and you must collaborate with, and particularly defer to, more experienced editors.--Bbb23 (talk) 21:00, 9 January 2022 (UTC)