User talk:Birdeaux78

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First user account and conflict of interest editing on Nancy Ponzi ?[edit]

I have just come across your first article Nancy Ponzi and your first edits and I am having difficulty in believing that this are your first edits and articles on wikipedia. You first and second edits were to clean up articles in accordance with MOS this is very very unusual for a newbie especially one that quotes WP guidelines in the edit summary. You have also added this photo https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nancy_Ponzi.jpg with the statement that it comes from the Ponzi vineyards collection. All of this points to a probable WP:COI with the subject of this page possibly as a WP:PAID editor and may also suggest that you have already edited using another account or an IP address . If this is case you must make a suitable declaration. Dom from Paris (talk) 14:00, 6 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, thank you for your message. I understand how this looks but I can assure you I have not been paid. Wine and history are hobbies of mine. I was reading some Wikipedia articles and noticed gaps in the history of Oregon wine and thought it would be fun to fill them. I was going to start with the Ponzi family, then work on Charles Coury, Dick Erath, and David Lett--Oregon's wine pioneers. A lot of Oregon's wine history is not on Wikipedia yet. I have advanced degrees in writing and I did a lot of research on how to write a wikipedia article because I wanted to do it right. If you look at my contributions, Nancy Ponzi is my second article. I did the Dick Ponzi article first. If you look at my activity, you'll see I took a long time to do both articles because I had to look things up a lot on in wikipedia how-to articles. That image you mentioned comes from a public collection of the Ponzi Family's memorabilia at Linfield College with permissions for educational use. Seems stupid to accuse me of being fake just because I was careful and tried to do things well. I'm trying to round out a section of Wikipedia that is really lacking. Do all newbies who do a decent job right off the bat get attacked like this? I quote the guidelines because I looked them up, for crying out loud, and was trying to show the basis for the edit. Let me know what I need to do to convince you. I don't know how to make a suitable declaration. I don't even know what that is and can't find it in the Wikipedia guidelines.Birdeaux78 (talk) 18:49, 12 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]