User talk:Maria Bena

April 2025

Hello Maria Bena. The nature of your edits, such as the one you made to Sustainable biofuel, 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:Maria Bena. The template {{Paid}} can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form: {{paid|user=Maria Bena|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. AntiDionysius (talk) 12:31, 11 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

In the article Sustainable Biofuel I uploaded as external link an e-book on maritime fuels, which is free for download by anyone. How can this be considered as paid advocacy? Is it because the e-book comes from a start-up company? I thought that the purpose of Wikipedia is to benefit readers by presenting information on any subject. And this is what I tried to do here. Share information that is usuful and free. If this is not allowed, please enlighten me and let me know the "code of conduct". You might want to check in the same section another upload link for The Role of Biofuels Beyond 2020 (in the UK), Element Energy Limited which was commissioned by BP. If you click on it it directs you to this page https://www.erm.com/solutions/energy-transition/ and not to the document!! I would say that is advertising, don't you agree? Whoever uploaded this, is promoting the interests of ERM and is faulsely claiming to have provided the link to a document. Finally, the page you provided (you can post such a mandatory disclosure to your user page at User:Maria Bena.) does not exist. Thank you. Maria Bena (talk) 14:49, 11 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It is paid advocacy because you are an employee of the company whose materials you posted a link to. It's still paid advocacy even if the thing you are advocating doesn't cost money - it's "paid" because you are being paid to advocate.

Your user page does not currently exist, yes, but you can create it. AntiDionysius (talk) 15:22, 11 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This might be so, but I did not post advertising material but a research backed by comprehensive data. You do accept studies , white papers and researches correct? These have been written either by individuals or by institutions, universities, companies. I can not publish Harvard's content and they can not publish ours. I do not have the ownership or the concent to publish somebody else's content. Who can do that? He who has the copyright. So what do you propose to do? But you seem to be very vocal about my advocacy while you say nothing about the ERM link I mentioned before which leads to their services page. I would hate to think that Wikipedia has double standards.. 91.140.29.59 (talk) 17:09, 11 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The content of what you posted doesn't matter. You are a paid editor and required to comply with the paid editing policy. It is contained in the terms of service which you accepted when you made a Wikipedia account. I propose that you read the paid editing policy and follow it.

Pointing to other content won't change this basic fact. If you have evidence that someone else has engaged in undisclosed paid editing then by all means report it, but you still have to follow the rules. AntiDionysius (talk) 17:24, 11 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I have no problem in complying with your editing policy neither I tried to hide anything. I answered immediately to you and was very upfront. Obviously I did not pay attention to the policy and I will read it more carefully. But the policy needs to apply to everyone. And my comment about the other content was very specific: the title of the content and the link do not correspond. The link and the page it directs you to it's an obvious violation of your policy. Transparency is a two way street. 91.140.29.59 (talk) 17:42, 11 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Since you've gone to the trouble of creating an account, please edit while logged in, if merely to keep the discussion in one location. I wanted to visit your page (politely) to suggest that revealing your IP address may inadvertently allow editors to find out your service provider and geolocation. If you'd like me to blank the ip address I'm happy to help. BusterD (talk) 12:48, 14 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Welcome!

Hello, Maria Bena, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions.

I noticed that one of the first articles you edited was Sustainable biofuel, which appears to be dealing with a topic with which you may have a conflict of interest. In other words, you may find it difficult to write about that topic in a neutral and objective way, because you are, work for, or represent, the subject of that article. Your recent contributions may have already been undone for this very reason.

To reduce the chances of your contributions being undone, you might like to draft your revised article before submission, and then ask me or another editor to proofread it. See our help page on userspace drafts for more details. If the page you created has already been deleted from Wikipedia, but you want to save the content from it to use for that draft, don't hesitate to ask anyone from this list and they will copy it to your user page.

One rule we do have in connection with conflicts of interest is that accounts used by more than one person will unfortunately be blocked from editing. Wikipedia generally does not allow editors to have usernames which imply that the account belongs to a company or corporation. If you have a username like this, you should request a change of username or create a new account. (A name that identifies the user as an individual within a given organization may be OK.)

In addition, if you receive, or expect to receive, compensation for any contribution you make, you must disclose your employer, client, and affiliation to comply with our terms of use and our policy on paid editing.

Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

Best practices for editors with close associations
The five pillars of Wikipedia
Contributing to Wikipedia
Tutorial
How to edit a page and How to develop articles
How to create your first article (using the Article Wizard if you wish)
Simplified Manual of Style
The Teahouse, our help forum for new editors

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, visit the Teahouse, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{Help me}} before the question. Again, welcome! BusterD (talk) 11:50, 14 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Buster and thank you for your comments. I am already in contact with AntiDionysius about my editing in this topic. He informed me that I should include in my profile a declaration about my relationship with VesselBot (which is the rightful owner of the content), which I have done already. I see now that you have already undone my contribution, even though the link I provided was a comprehensive analysis of renewables and biofuels in GHG emissions reduction. Yes I work for VesselBot and yes Vesselbot is the owner of this content. But just as I have mentioned to AntiDionysius, this content is a well framed, unbiast analysis by our data analyst about a topic that is not directly connected with our business proposal. In our line of work we aim to provide assistance to business professionals in different aspects of their work. The data we analyze can be used of course (as a paid service) by our clients in order to achieve their decarbonization targets but they also give us insights in other aspects which we try to explore. For example we have written reports on the Red Sea disruption after the Houthi attacks and how this has affected both the supply chain trade lanes and the distribution of GHG emissions on the planet. Our analysis and reports have been used (always free of charge) by journalists (CNBC, FT etc) and organizations like IMF. I am saying all these just to prove my point: that the reports we issue are not an advertising material. Not any more in any case than a report/analysis from Harvard or any of the Big4 (like the Deloitte article included as reference in the wiki article about Digital twins!!). And although you rushed to delete my contribution as paid advocacy/conflict of interest, you have kept the external link about Roundtable on Sustainable Materials, which when you click on it it takes you to RSB landing page which does not include any mention of the topic! As I mentioned transparency is a two way street. So I would appreciate an explanation as to why our contribution was deleted and the Deloitte article (I mentioned before) is still considered acceptable. This will help me understand if and how we could share our analytic work with the audience of Wikipedia. thank you. Maria Bena (talk) 14:23, 14 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Talk page contributions like the one above are so rambling and unfocused it's very difficult to determine how to help. I'm here in a strictly administrative capacity. I think you should continue discussing on the merits with AntiDionysius. I have no particular interest here except protecting the pedia from promotion and undue COI contributions. The WP:Teahouse is available 24 hours a day to answer questions. BusterD (talk) 14:32, 14 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]