User:EMsmile - Wikipedia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This user, in accordance with the Wikimedia Foundation's Terms of Use, discloses that she has been paid by various clients within her self-employed freelancer status since 2012 (see below for details of clients) for her contributions to Wikipedia.
![]() |
This user is a female contributor. |
I am a freelancer and edit on Wikipedia both in a volunteer capacity and also under various funded projects (see below in "About me" for more information on these projects). I manage the potential conflict of interest by ensuring the following:
- I always retain my own editorial judgement. If you disagree with any of my edits, please feel free to take it up on my talk page or the article's talk page. To see how my partners' or funders' goals (e.g. SEI and Formas) align with those of the Wikimedia movement please see their websites.
- I solicit contributions of content to Wikipedia and thus staff time from a number of organisations and individuals. My wish to retain positive relationships with these organisations is not a conflict of interest.
- When I am editing Wikipedia as part of my professional duties, I always strive to strictly abide by Wikipedia's accepted practices on conflicts of interest, neutrality, and notability. I will always work in the best interest of Wikipedia, because that's what I believe in and it's also is in line with the missions of those organisations who have funded my time so far (philanthropic foundations, NGOs, government entities).
Voluntary restrictions
[edit]
Prompted by the ANI in January 2025 (see Special:PermanentLink/1274969384#Non-neutral_paid_editor) and questions by the community regarding a possible poorly managed conflict of interest during my editing activities in 2024, I am imposing the following voluntary editing restrictions on myself, starting 22 January 2025:
- No more direct or indirect edits to the following articles for at least a one year period (until January 2026), including no edits on the talk page (unless I get pinged). After that period, working through edit requests on the talk page would in principle be allowed again but direct edits not if there was still a conflicting paid editing arrangement in place:
- No more edits on the Solar radiation modification article if the content would be in relationship to the non-use agreement, and only saying something about the non-use agreement on the talk page if I get pinged - until the time that I confirm that my paid editing project with Earth System Governance Foundation (or a related client) is over.
- No edits to the Wikipedia articles of organisations that are "affiliated Research Centres" within the Global Alliance of Earth System Governance Research Centres (see here). Also no edits to the Wikipedia articles of any major people within those research centres. These restrictions are to apply for the duration of any paid editing activity plus for one year after any such arrangements have ended.
I started Wikipedia editing in October 2014 after being inspired by the work of James Heilman with WikiProject Medicine. To find out more about my work on Wikipedia, please look at my contributions. My background is in process engineering. I currently live in Germany. I am a freelancer and work for myself since 2012. I am a female Wikipedian and am interested in reducing gender bias on Wikipedia.
Some of my Wikipedia milestones and projects (most recent first, and any potential conflict of interest aspects will be handled as per my disclosure statement above):
- From June 2024 to June 2025, I have a small consultancy project where my client is the Earth System Governance Foundation. I have provided technical and scientific advice on social media outreach to them, including helping with updating and improving articles related to earth system governance research and related topics on Wikipedia (one of them being solar radiation modification).
- Clarification (in response to a Wikipedia:ANI brought against me in January 2025 (see here)): The Earth System Governance Foundation has no political or advocacy positions. It is a small charity under Dutch law, created to support scientific research on earth system governance and to assist with knowledge dissemination. The relationship between ESG Foundation and ESG Project (a network of academics and scholars) is briefly explained here.
- From July 2024 to March 2025, I supported Utrecht University with integrating key results from publications that have come out of the Global Goals project into relevant Wikipedia articles (for example earth system governance, global governance, Sustainable Development Goals, sustainable development, environmental governance, environmental policy, environmental politics, policy coherence for development). The Global Goals project was a five–year programme to assess and explain the steering effects of the Sustainable Development Goals.
- From August 2022 to July 2024, I have been working on a research communications project that deals with SDG 13 (action on climate change). This project is administered by Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) and funded by Formas (a Swedish government research council for sustainable development and a state authority under the Swedish Ministry of the Environment).
- From April 2022 to October 2024, I have been working to support the REACH programme in the UK (a global research programme with the title "improving water security for the poor"). My services are administered through Skat Foundation. Here, the idea is to improve relevant Wikipedia articles that touch on climate resilient WASH topics, e.g. the Wikipedia articles on water security, WASH, effects of climate change on the water cycle, effects of climate change, groundwater, water resources, climate resilience.
- I presented at a training session called "Wikipedia for Science" at the International Mountains Conference (IMC) in Innsbruck on 12 September 2022. There, we encouraged early career researchers in the area of mountains (for examples mountains and climate change adaptation) to take up Wikipedia editing to improve that content on Wikipedia. My time to help prepare this training session was covered by the program Adaptation at Altitude. For slides and resources from the event see here.
- Participated in WikiForHumanRights Challenge in April 2021 by editing the article effects of climate change on humans and related articles.
- From August 2020 to July 2022, I was working on a research communications project with Wikipedia that deals with SDG 6, SDG 13 and SDG 14 (Phase 1). It is funded by a Swedish research council. For more information see here.
- In November 2020, I was acting as a moderator, trainer, advisor and editor for an online edit-a-thon on climate change topics, with a focus on Africa (24 November to 1 December). This is done under a consultancy contract with SouthSouthNorth (SSN) in South Africa. The event is connected with WikiProject Climate Change and Wikimedians for Sustainable Development. It is relevant for Sustainable Development Goal 13.
- From July to September 2020, I was involved as a coordinator, facilitator, trainer and editor for an online edit-a-thon on SDGs during Global Goals Week. This was done under a consultancy contract with Project Everyone in the UK. This is part of the larger initiative "Wiki loves Sustainable Development Goals" which was started in late 2019, see here on Meta.
- I joined the WikiProject Climate change in September 2019
- I was at the Wikimania Conference in Stockholm in August 2019 (my first one).
- I am active in the WikiProject Sanitation which I co-founded in 2014. We have run two drives to update WASH-related content on Wikipedia. They took place in March and November 2017 for World Water Day and World Toilet Day, respectively. See our Meetup page with more information here.
Science Communication
[edit]
Part of the Wikimedia Science Communication Network
Articles and pages that I have involved myself in
[edit]
Articles that I created or helped to create
[edit]
- Container-based sanitation
- Dry toilet
- Emergency sanitation
- Failures of water supply and sanitation systems
- Fecal sludge management
- Global Goals Week
- Greenhouse gas emissions (created April 2021 as spin off from greenhouse gas)
- Groundwater pollution
- List of abbreviations used in sanitation
- List of water supply and sanitation by country
- Malnutrition in children
- Menstrual Hygiene Day
- Menstrual hygiene management (created June 2019 as spin off from Menstrual Hygiene Day)
- Ocean temperature
- Reuse of excreta
- Sanitation worker
- Sewer mining
- Sustainable Development Goal 1
- Sustainable Development Goal 2
- Sustainable Development Goal 3
- Sustainable Development Goal 4
- Sustainable Development Goal 5
- Sustainable Development Goal 6
- Sustainable Development Goal 7
- Sustainable Development Goal 8
- Sustainable Development Goal 9
- Sustainable Development Goal 10
- Sustainable Development Goal 11
- Sustainable Development Goal 12
- Sustainable Development Goal 13
- Urine-diverting dry toilet
- World Toilet Day
Wikipedia Meetup articles
[edit]
- Meetup pages for two virtual edit-a-thons on sanitation topics in 2017
- Wiki loves SDGs online edit-a-thon in Sept 2020
- Communication of 3 environment SDGs in Sept 2020
- Wiki4Climate online edit-a-thon Nov 2020
Articles which I have helped to improve quite a bit (selection)
[edit]
- Climate change in Country X - a suite of articles on climate change in particular countries (CCC articles)
- Capacity development
- Climate change adaptation
- Climate change mitigation
- Community-led total sanitation
- Developing country
- Ecological sanitation
- Ecosystem
- Effects of climate change
- Effects of climate change on agriculture
- Effects of climate change on human health
- Effects of climate change on mental health
- Effects of climate change on oceans
- Effects of climate change on the water cycle
- Groundwater pollution
- Hygiene
- Marine plastic pollution
- Manual scavenging
- Menstrual cup
- Ocean
- Ocean acidification
- Public health
- Public toilet
- Reclaimed water
- Sanitation
- Sewage
- Sewage treatment
- Sustainability
- Sustainable development
- Sustainable Development Goals and all the individual goal articles, e.g. Sustainable Development Goal 6
- Unisex public toilet
- WASH
- Water cycle
- Water pollution
- Water security
Articles where I was involved in a merger or renaming discussion
[edit]
Discussions on talk pages which I found revealing
[edit]
- Talk page of Gender bias on Wikipedia - one person arguing there is no such thing and the article shouldn't even exist (March 2021)
- "Ownership" of India article
- Can the Bangladesh country article have a sub-heading on climate change?
Reminders to myself
[edit]
- Speedy deletion tag to make way for page move: {{db-move|page=Plastic soup|reason="need to delete this page to make way etc.}}
- To add a hidden comment: for example <!-- The third and fourth paragraph of this section is transcribed to [[urine]], please keep that in mind if you make changes -->
- Code of conduct
- Use this on talk pages so that references appear with the comments on the talk page: {{reflist-talk}}
- Getting copyright sorted out for an image on Wikimedia commons, place this template at "Source": {{subst:OP}}. See also here for e-mail template: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Email_templates (automatic release generator)
- If you want to do a page swap, please make a request at WP:RMT, or use {{db-move}}
- Roundrobin swap for two/three articles: Wikipedia:ROUNDROBIN
- For recurrent discussions about male/female versus "people with vaginas" etc., see recent discussion on talk page of menstrual cycle: Talk:Menstrual cycle#Gender-neutral language (if link is broken then search in archive). This includes an update to a previous discussion that took place here: Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 161#Gender-neutral language in human sex-specific articles
- Do not synthesis published material (WP:SYN): "Do not combine material from multiple sources to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by any source. Similarly, do not combine different parts of one source to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by the source. If one reliable source says A and another reliable source says B, do not join A and B together to imply a conclusion C not mentioned by either of the sources."
- Use this template for page numbers: {{rp}}, such as {{rp|5}}
- To search for something inside of the Wikipedia system (i.e. the "internal" pages), simply add "WP:" before your search term in the search box. Example: If you put "WP:Manual of Style" into the search box of Wikipedia, it will take you to the internal Manual of Style pages of Wikipedia.
- To display pageviews on talk page: {{Annual readership}}
- To add section sizes to the talk page: {{section sizes}}
Indicating where text was copied from a compatibly licenced publication
[edit]
- When using content from publications that are under a compatible licence we can indicate the attribution in an inline citation as in the following: |doi-access=free}} [[File:CC-BY icon.svg|50px]] Text was copied from this source, which is available under a [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License]</ref> (there is a table with compatible licenses at the Copyright FAQ).
- Note: not all open access publications are under a compatible licence! You have to re-check this each time. Many of them are CC BY SA (and therefore compatible) but many are also CC BY NC ND (not compatible).
- Twinkle is a popular JavaScript Wikipedia gadget that gives autoconfirmed registered users many extra options to assist them in common Wikipedia maintenance tasks and to help them deal with acts of vandalism or unconstructive edits.
- To edit my Twinkle javascript page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:EMsmile/twinkleoptions.js
- To edit the template for my Welcome note: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Wiki_loves_SDGs_invitation_1, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Wiki4Climate_welcome_note_(newbies), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Wiki4Climate_welcome_note_(oldies)
- To analyse pageviews for a group of articles use petscan and pagepile and massviews tool.
- First I created the list of our articles (145 unique articles). I copied that into a tool called petscan in the tab called “other sources” in the field called “Manual list”. In the field called “wiki” I added “enwiki” for English Wikipedia. I then clicked on “do it” at the bottom of the page. Then I went to the tab called “output”. Here I clicked on “format: page pile” and clicked again on “do it”. and clicked output “page pile”. This gave me a page pile number of 43473 which looked like this. Then I entered that page pile number into massviews tool where under “source” one has to select page pile and then put the page pile number into the field next to the source. Then click “submit”. This then looks like this.
- Revision deletion can be requested using the template
{{copyvio-revdel}}
: Place the template on the current version, and list in the template which diffs need to be hidden and why. Please see the template documentation for full instructions.
- Who wrote that? - A tool to find out who wrote certain parts of Wikipedia articles.
- Enabling a script: On the wiki you'd like to enable the script, add
importScript('User:EpochFail/ArticleQuality.js')
to your common.js page. So here en:User:EMsmile/common.js.- Readability tool: To install this script, go to your common.js and add the following line: importScript('User:Phlsph7/Readability.js'); // Backlink: [[User:Phlsph7/Readability.js]]
- A tool to find unreliable sources in the ref list, marking them in colour: User:Headbomb/unreliable (add that to your common.js page, see above).
- Overview of tools
- WPPageHistStat looks at the stats of the history of an article
- Article finder tool - We recommend finding an article related to your topic that is low quality, incomplete, or read by a lot of people.
- Link to a tool that can pick up copyright violations.
- Explanations about excerpt tool: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Excerpt
- Find link tool
- Google books search results changes over time
User statistics regarding mobile phone use
[edit]
- Analytics: https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#all-sites-by-os/os-family-and-major-hierarchical-view
- Here's the main page on stats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics
- This helpful description was provided to me by User:Efbrazil . "For that graphic I put the data in Excel, pasted the chart into Powerpoint, then added the text there along with stuff like the curly braces, exported as svg from powerpoint, then touched up the svg in notepad to get the fonts right and remove some weird span breaks in the text so that localization can be done. It's not very elegant I'm afraid. For a minor edit like that text change I mentioned I simply check the file out, open it in notepad, make the text change, then check it back in. No localization or anything else gets messed up that way. The other thing you can use is inkscape, which is an open source svg editor that works pretty well. It's pretty heavy duty though- feels a bit like an adobe product in terms of having a hundred toolbar buttons on screen at once. I use that to edit svg files visually."
- See also discussion here about copyright issues with graphs from IPCC reports: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Copyright#Graphics_published_by_the_IPCC
You can send me an e-mail via Wikipedia like this: Special:EmailUser/EMsmile. If you have a gripe to settle with me, something that you think I have done wrong, something that annoyed you terribly, or some constructive criticism please consider using direct e-mail as it might help to clarify or defuse the situation more efficiently than writing publicly on an article's talk page might. Just something to think about in the interest of keeping things positive and less confrontational.