User talk:SueannSAM

September 2025

Hello SueannSAM. The nature of your edits, such as the one you made to The Smith Family (charity), 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:SueannSAM. The template {{Paid}} can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form: {{paid|user=SueannSAM|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. Magnolia677 (talk) 11:31, 15 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Magnolia677 thank you for this. I do work for The Smith Family, which is a charity, but this is the first time I have been tasked to update our page and am coming in completely blind here. So just checking I've understood your message correctly - in my profile I need to disclose that I am an employee of The Smith Family. And ideally I put any suggested changes in the talk page? Is there any other way I can update this page which is quite out of date? I was aiming to add information objectively and cite external sources where possible. Any thoughts or guidance would be much appreciated! Kind regards Sue Ann SueannSAM (talk) 04:28, 16 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]