User talk:Mepperson94

Hello Mepperson94. 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 employed (or being compensated in any way) by a person, group, company or organization to promote their interests. Paid advocacy on Wikipedia must be disclosed even if you have not specifically been asked to edit Wikipedia. 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 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 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:Mepperson94. The template {{Paid}} can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form: {{paid|user=Mepperson94|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. bonadea contributions talk 08:38, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

Hello,

Thank you for your feedback. I do not have any financial stake to disclose.

I'm still a brand-new Wikipedia contributor and learning the ropes. The article I contributed is not intended to be a promotion. It's the first organization I could think of that didn't already have a Wikipedia page, so I used it to practice. If you could point me to the problematic promotional parts of the article, I would be happy to fix them, but I'm having trouble finding the issues. I included sources from the state's historical society, a local business journal, a press release, and magazines, but I never cited the brand's website or anything they published themselves. Mepperson94 (talk) 18:25, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

I have seen Wikipedia:Help desk/Archive 69#Contributing to Wikipedia. Did you refer to the text "Contribute" above "Help" in the sidebar to the left? It's not supposed to be clickable. There is a line under it, and it's a heading for the following links. It's admittedly hard to guess in our current default skin Vector 2022. It was more clear in the former default Vector, now called Vector legacy, which has several such headings and more space above them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?useskin=vector. I'm considering an interface request to make it more clear it's a heading. If it was indeed your problem then I can include you as an example together with Wikipedia:Help desk/Archive 67#The "Contribute" link is not working and Wikipedia:Help desk#"Contribute" Disabled. We don't want our users to think contribution is unwanted. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:51, 5 August 2025 (UTC)