Wikipedia:COI in 5W
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This page describes the situation of Conflict of interest, also known as COI.
Who?
[edit]- You're affected by the conflict of interest, if you're affiliated with subject of an article you're working on, including but not limited to these examples:
- Directly:
- I work for this company.
- An example is paid editing.
- I am the article subject.
- I work for this company.
- Indirectly:
- My friend works for this company.
- The article subject is my relative.
- Directly:
Where?
[edit]- Article main-space, discussions and collaboration.
What?
[edit]- Do not write articles which you have a conflict of interest with.
- Read notability inclusion criteria. If qualify, use WP:REQ to request an article to be created for you by a volunteer familiar with the topic.
- The list is categorized by topics and volunteers specialized in topics work through the list regularly.
- You can work with any topics in the requested articles queue you're comfortable with. You will get help with writing articles you have no conflict of interest with — at talk pages, and on IRC.
When?
[edit]- When authoring an article (writing an article from scratch).
- When contributing to an article (adding more data).
- When discussing a topic at Wikipedia.
Why?
[edit]- Overheads are caused by the conflict of your goals (promoting your subject) with Wikipedia goals (shaping an encyclopedia, not an international dumping ground).
- The overheads might discourage you from perceiving Wikipedia as a productive environment, and hinder you from contributing to it.
- If often takes couple orders of magnitude more time and effort, both for you and for the helpers, to get you create and publish an article, than for a specialized contributor to process it from the requested articles queue.
- The time could be spent on processing the WP:REQ queue instead.
- A Wikipedia article does not help to optimize an article subject appearance in search results. If article subject is not discussed in external sources, a Wikipedia article would not make a significant difference. See SEO for techniques to get the article subject website more visible on the web, promote it elsewhere if it doesn't have a website — create more references, and a Wikipedia article only then, after multiple third-party sources refer to the article subject.
- Some people point out that the Infobox, which shows up at the right of search results when users query for the article title, is wonderful and makes a difference. However, please do note that the search results themselves remain unaffected: the infobox and the search results are retrieved independently of each-other.
How?
[edit]- Always disclose your conflict of interest when due.
- Read all links given to you carefully. They merely ensure efficient work on everything in long-term.