Wikipedia:COI in 5W

This page describes the situation of Conflict of interest, also known as COI.

Who?

• 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.
  • Indirectly:
    • My friend works for this company.
    • The article subject is my relative.

Where?

• Article main-space, discussions and collaboration.

What?

• 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?

• When authoring an article (writing an article from scratch).
• When contributing to an article (adding more data).
• When discussing a topic at Wikipedia.

Why?

• 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?

• 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.