User talk:Srahpeeters

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Happy editing! DoubleGrazing (talk) 11:32, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

Your submission at Articles for creation: Flemish Institute for Technological Research (January 8)

Your recent article submission to Articles for Creation has been reviewed. Unfortunately, it has not been accepted at this time. The reason left by DoubleGrazing was: Please check the submission for any additional comments left by the reviewer. You are encouraged to edit the submission to address the issues raised and resubmit after they have been resolved.

• If you would like to continue working on the submission, go to Draft:Flemish Institute for Technological Research and click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window.
• If you do not edit your draft in the next 6 months, it will be considered abandoned and may be deleted.
• If you need any assistance, or have experienced any untoward behavior associated with this submission, you can ask for help at the Articles for creation help desk, on the reviewer's talk page or use Wikipedia's real-time chat help from experienced editors.

DoubleGrazing (talk) 11:32, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

Hello, Srahpeeters! Having an article draft declined at Articles for Creation can be disappointing. If you are wondering why your article submission was declined, please post a question at the Articles for creation help desk. If you have any other questions about your editing experience, we'd love to help you at the Teahouse, a friendly space on Wikipedia where experienced editors lend a hand to help new editors like yourself! See you there! DoubleGrazing (talk) 11:32, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

January 2025

Hello Srahpeeters. The nature of your edits, such as the one you made to Draft:Flemish Institute for Technological Research, 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:Srahpeeters. The template {{Paid}} can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form: {{paid|user=Srahpeeters|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. DoubleGrazing (talk) 11:33, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

As previously advised, your edits give the impression you have a financial stake in promoting a topic, but you have not complied with Wikipedia's mandatory paid editing disclosure requirements. You were asked to cease editing until you responded by either stating that you are not being directly or indirectly compensated for your edits, or by complying with the mandatory requirements under the Wikimedia Terms of Use that you disclose your employer, client and affiliation. Again, you can post such a disclosure on your user page at User:Srahpeeters, and the template {{Paid}} can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form: {{paid|user=Srahpeeters|employer=InsertName|client=InsertName}}. Please respond before making any other edits to Wikipedia. DoubleGrazing (talk) 13:34, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

Hi, I think I can be seen as a user indirectly compensated for edits, as I am a regular employee at VITO, working in the Digital Communications team. We just want our info to be accessible for Dutch ánd English speaking persons looking for info about VITO on the internet. Should I use the following disclosure? {{paid|user=Srahpeeters|employer=VITO|client=none}}. We've tried to be as neutral as possible in our edits to the page. I hope you can publish the page after the disclosure has been approved. Thanks, Sarah.

Srahpeeters (talk) 13:57, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for replying. You can either place the {{paid}} template on our own user page User:Srahpeeters, or the {{Connected contributor (paid)}} one on the draft talk page Draft talk:Flemish Institute for Technological Research, in both cases filled-in with the necessary details (most importantly creating the connection between you and the draft, ie. the former must say which article/draft it relates to, whereas the latter must say which user). If you need any help with that, or if you'd like me to do this for you, let me know.

You can continue editing the draft once you have made the disclosure, but you are not allowed to move the draft into the main encyclopaedia yourself, this will be done by AfC reviewers if and when they accept the draft. Afterwards, you are not allowed to edit the published article yourself (other than for minor corrections such as typos), but must instead make edit requests via the article talk page; the easiest way to do that is by using the wizard at WP:ERW.

HTH, -- DoubleGrazing (talk) 15:01, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

I think I succeeded in adding the disclosure to the draft. Could you check please. Thanks, Sarah Srahpeeters (talk) 15:46, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

Yep, that's correctly done, thank you. :) DoubleGrazing (talk) 15:49, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

Ok, super thanks! If you could you give us some more concrete tips for further editing the page to make it eligible for publishing, that would be great as we lost our confidence in this respect. Thanks, Sarah. Srahpeeters (talk) 15:52, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

Sure, happy to help. This is going to be a lengthy message, and you may not like what you're about to read, but here goes...

I'll start with your point about the Dutch Wikipedia article. Although it might not seem obvious, each language version of Wikipedia is a totally separate project, with their own policies and requirements. What is acceptable in one version may not be acceptable in another, and having an article in one language doesn't mean that translations thereof can be automatically published in other versions. What's more, the English version has the strictest requirements in terms of the two core policies of notability and verifiability; it therefore follows that articles often fail to be accepted here, even when they may already exist in one or more of the other language versions. Whenever I'm thinking of translating an article into English, I first check whether the sources in the original article are sufficient for publication here, and if not, whether I can find additional sources. If I can't, then I don't even start to translate, as I know it would be a wasted effort. I appreciate that you don't have the luxury of dropping this topic and finding something else to write about instead, but nevertheless I'm mentioning this to help manage expectations.

Earlier I declined your draft for lack of evidence that the subject is notable. For organisations, the relevant notability guideline is laid out at WP:ORG. It requires multiple (= 3+) sources that are

1. secondary
2. reliable
3. entirely independent (of the subject, and of each other), and
4. provide significant coverage, directly of the subject and not some indirectly related or ancillary matters.

Each of the 3+ sources must meet every one of these four criteria.

This standard is stricter than it perhaps seems, and excludes many types of material commonly found even in secondary sources, such as:

• routine business reporting (appointments, new facilities or locations, new product or service launches, financial results, mergers & acquisitions, etc.)
• interviews or anything else where someone from the organisation in question is commenting on things
• coverage based on press releases and other corporate publicity
• any sort of sponsored content, etc.
• We also discount sources that are very local, or very sector/technology-specific, because they tend to have very low 'news threshold' for anything happening in their locality or speciality.

Wikipedia articles should be composed mainly by summarising (in your own words, but without putting any additional 'spin' on things) what such sources have said. You then cite each source against the information it has provided. This gives you appropriate content, the necessary referencing, and the required evidence of notability, all in one go. This approach is called the WP:GOLDENRULE of Wikipedia article creation.

You may supplement this with limited amounts of information from primary sources such as the organisation's own website or some industry associations or public sector bodies, but this must be purely factual and entirely non-contentious, such as location of HQ, year of founding, names of senior leadership, etc. Note in this context that we have no interest in corporate jargon like vision/mission/values, or detailed product/service descriptions, or lists of past leaders or 'brand ambassadors' etc., even if such information is factual.

What you mustn't do is write what you (or your boss - speaking of which, see WP:BOSS) want to write about your organisation, and then try to find sources that hopefully support what you've written. This is what we call writing WP:BACKWARD. It is also inherently promotional (see WP:YESPROMO). If you want to tell the world about your organisation, you need to use your own website or some other communications channel for that. I repeat, we are almost exclusively interested in what independent and reliable third parties have, entirely of their own volition, said about your organisation and what in their opinion makes it worthy of note.

Have I managed to completely put you off yet? :) If you've made it this far, congratulations, and good luck with the task ahead!

Best, -- DoubleGrazing (talk) 16:57, 8 January 2025 (UTC)