User talk:Qeole

Managing a conflict of interest

Hello, Qeole. 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 conflict of interest may be unduly influenced by their connection to the topic. See the conflict of interest guideline and FAQ for organizations for more information. We ask that you:

avoid editing or creating articles about yourself, your family, friends, colleagues, company, organization, clients, or competitors;
propose changes on the talk pages of affected articles (you can use the {{edit COI}} template);
disclose your conflict of interest when discussing affected articles (see Wikipedia:Conflict of interest § How to disclose a COI);
avoid linking to your organization's website in other articles (see Wikipedia:Spam § External link spamming);
do your best to comply with Wikipedia's content policies.

In addition, you are required by the Wikimedia Foundation's terms of use to disclose your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution which forms all or part of work for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation. See Wikipedia:Paid-contribution disclosure.

Also, editing for the purpose of advertising, publicising, or promoting anyone or anything is not permitted. This is regarding the introduction of your company's product into other articles, such as Cilium with an apparent intention of increasing publicity and prominence. Graywalls (talk) 16:11, 24 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Greetings,

Thanks for taking the time to drop and motivate the notice. I'm not sure how to interpret it, and would welcome some further explanations. I can read this notice as a warning about conflicts of interests, of which I take note. I do agree that biased contents are not a good thing on Wikipedia, and I'm willing to try and do better in the future. But accompanied with the suppressions of some of my updates, this reads more like a slap on the wrist, which hurts, and I'd like to understand better what I've been doing wrong.

You mention “This is regarding the introduction of your company's product into other articles, such as Cilium with an apparent intention of increasing publicity and prominence”, which I interpret as a reference to the addition of Cilium to the list of Graduated projects on the CNCF's page (you used “articles”, plural, so maybe I'm missing something else?). I'm not sure why there is an “apparent intention of increasing publicity and prominence”, but I deplore it. I was not paid or otherwise mandated by my company to edit the page, nor am I seeking additional visibility for the project. I was aware of the existence of the list, and simply wanted to update the page, knowing that Cilium, the open source project (that belongs to CNCF and not to my company), had first been accepted for incubation and then graduated, and that this list would get more complete/up-to-date from this addition. I contributed in my own name, stating my affiliation for the sake of transparency, in case there would be some discussion on the objectivity of the contents or citations. I did not expect that stating my affiliation would deserve the complete removal of the entry.

This removal is the thing I struggle most to understand. You label it “promotional editing”, but the entry was factual, backed by citations; the description of Cilium was brief and not promotional as far as I can tell, the location in first position in the list was solely dictated by the alphabetical ordering of the list. Cilium is a Graduated project and rightfully belongs to the list. Why then remove the edit? Please try to understand that, from where I stand, it seems the entry was removed on the basis of the presumed intention rather than the quality or relevance of the contribution, and this feels unfair. For what it's worth, I realise today that the list on the CNCF page is not exhaustive, and I'm happy to complete it with the other missing projects (with which I'm not affiliated), too, if it can help dispel the misunderstanding about the original intention.

I do understand that you've done a lot of contributions for Wikipedia, and likely have more experience than I do about similar situations. I respect your judgement - even though I'd like to convince that my intentions were good - but I'd appreciate if you could help me understand where the contribution was biased, and how anyone else not affiliated to the project would have come up with a better entry for Cilium. In the current state of affairs, I'm left with a feeling that the Cilium entry I created contained subjective information, when I believed it did not, or that I completely missed the point and that I messed up with some other edit - and none of these perspectives feel good.

Best regards, Qeole (talk) 14:07, 25 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Editing about yourself, your company or friends or family members is strongly discouraged. There was an appearance of prominence boosting as the cited sources were all CNCF or Cilium related, including poor quality source such as Cilium blog. When editing on something closely related to you, it's expected that such is done through COI edit request Graywalls (talk) 19:58, 25 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

OK. By “poor quality sources” I take it you mean a source with low recognition from an encyclopedic point of view. When doing the contribution, I thought that the press release from CNCF, in particular, would be authoritative about one of its projects graduating, I didn't realise the citations would be regarded the way you did.

Thanks for pointing this out, and for linking to the COI template. I'll be more careful in the future and use that template if relevant. Thanks again for taking the time to reply. Qeole (talk) 09:37, 26 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]