Stoff1888

Stoff1888, you are invited to the Teahouse!

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Hello, Stoff1888. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places, or things you have written about on Wikipedia, you may have a conflict of interest (COI). Editors with a COI may be unduly influenced by their connection to the topic, and it is important when editing Wikipedia articles that such connections be completely transparent. See the conflict of interest guideline and FAQ for organizations for more information. In particular, we ask that you please:

• avoid editing or creating articles related to you and your family, friends, school, company, club, or organization, as well as any competing companies' projects or products;
• instead, you are encouraged to propose changes on the Talk pages of affected article(s) (see the {{request edit}} template);
• when discussing affected articles, disclose your COI (see WP:DISCLOSE);
• avoid linking to the Wikipedia article or to the website of your organization in other articles (see WP:SPAM);
• exercise great caution so that you do not violate Wikipedia's content policies.

In addition, you must disclose your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution which forms all or part of work for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation (see WP:PAID).

Please take a few moments to read and review Wikipedia's policies regarding conflicts of interest, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, sourcing and autobiographies. Thank you. Deli nk (talk) 22:23, 24 May 2017 (UTC)

Conflict of interest in Wikipedia

Hi Stoff1888 I work on conflict of interest issues here in Wikipedia, along with my regular editing.

Thanks for disclosing here that you work at Abbott in Corporate Public Affairs. I am providing you with notice of Wikipedia's conflict of interest guideline and paid editing policy.

Hello, Stoff1888. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places, or things you have written about on Wikipedia, you may have a conflict of interest (COI). Editors with a COI may be unduly influenced by their connection to the topic, and it is important when editing Wikipedia articles that such connections be completely transparent. See the conflict of interest guideline and FAQ for organizations for more information. In particular, we ask that you please:

• avoid editing or creating articles related to you and your family, friends, school, company, club, or organization, as well as any competing companies' projects or products;
• instead, you are encouraged to propose changes on the Talk pages of affected article(s) (see the {{request edit}} template);
• when discussing affected articles, disclose your COI (see WP:DISCLOSE);
• avoid linking to the Wikipedia article or to the website of your organization in other articles (see WP:SPAM);
• exercise great caution so that you do not violate Wikipedia's content policies.

In addition, you must disclose your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution which forms all or part of work for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation (see WP:PAID).

Please take a few moments to read and review Wikipedia's policies regarding conflicts of interest, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, sourcing and autobiographies. Thank you.

Comments and requests

Wikipedia is a widely-used reference work and managing conflict of interest is essential for ensuring the integrity of Wikipedia and retaining the public's trust in it. As in academia, COI is managed here in two steps - disclosure and a form of peer review. Please note that there is no bar to being part of the Wikipedia community if you want to be involved in articles where you have a conflict of interest; there are just some things we ask you to do (and if you are paid, some things you need to do).

First, please settle on using one account. It appears that this is at least the third account you have used in WP - you have apparently used ScottStoffel and AbbottCorporatePublicAffairs as well, the latter of which has been blocked as a violation of our username policy.

Next, thanks for making disclosures on the talk pages of the articles about which you are concerned. To finish the disclosure piece, please add a disclosure to your user page (which is User:Stoff1888 - a redlink, because you haven't written anything there yet). Just something simple like: "I work at Abbott in Corporate Public Affairs" would be fine. If you want to add anything else there that is relevant to what you want to do in WP feel free to add it, but please don't add anything promotional about the company (see WP:USERPAGE for guidance if you like).

I added tags to the article's talk page, so the disclosure is done there. Once you disclose on your user page, the disclosure piece of this will be done.

As I noted above, there are two pieces to COI management in WP. The first is disclosure. The second is a form of peer review. This piece may seem a bit strange to you at first, but if you think about it, it will make sense. In Wikipedia, editors can immediately publish their work, with no intervening publisher or standard peer review -- you can just create an article, click save, and voilà there is a new article, and you can go into any article, make changes, click save, and done. No intermediary - no publisher, no "editors" as that term is used in the real world. And no author at the top of the page, so that readers know who wrote an article, and can read the article in light of who the authors are. And likewise, no COI disclosures on the face of a given article, as there are in scientific publications.

So the bias that conflicted editors tend to have, can go right into the article. Conflicted editors are also really driven to try to make the article fit with their external interest. If they edit directly, this often leads to big battles with other editors.

What we ask editors to do who have a COI and want to work on articles where their COI is relevant, is:

a) if you want to create an article relevant to a COI you have, create the article as a draft through the WP:AFC process, disclose your COI on the Talk page, and then submit the draft article for review (the AfC process sets up a nice big button for you to click when it is ready) so it can be reviewed before it publishes; and

b) And if you want to change content in any existing article on a topic where you have a COI, we ask you to propose content on the Talk page for others to review and implement before it goes live, instead of doing it directly yourself. You can make the edit request easily - and provide notice to the community of your request - by using the "edit request" function as described in the conflict of interest guideline. I made that easy for you by adding a section to the beige box at the top of the Talk page at - there is a link at "request corrections or suggest content" in that section -- if you click that, the Wikipedia software will automatically format a section in which you can make your request. You can also add a {{request edit}} tag to flag it for other editors to review.

By following those "peer review" processes, editors with a COI can contribute where they have a COI, and the integrity of WP can be protected. We get some great contributions that way, when conflicted editors take the time to understand what kinds of proposals are OK under the content policies. (which I will say more about, if you want).

I hope that makes sense to you.

I want to add here that per the WP:COI guideline, if you want to directly update simple, uncontroversial facts (for example, correcting the facts about where the company has offices) you can do that directly in the article, without making an edit request on the Talk page. Just be sure to always cite a reliable source for the information you change, and make sure it is simple, factual, uncontroversial content. If you are not sure if something is uncontroversial, please ask at the Talk page. (And by the way, edits like this one that you made to the Abbott page, go very far beyond what is OK. I recognized it as having been done by someone in your role even before I saw your disclosure. Please do not do that again)

Will you please agree to follow the peer review processes going forward, when you want to work on any article or any article where your COI is relevant? Do let me know, and if anything above doesn't make sense I would be happy to discuss. And if you want me to quickly go over the content policies, I can do that. Just let me know. Thanks! Jytdog (talk) 23:07, 24 May 2017 (UTC)