Wikipedia:Conflict of interest/Proposal
 | This page is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump. |
When a Wikipedia editor writes an article about himself, his company, or a group he is affiliated with, there is the potential for a conflict of interest. This does not invalidate this editor's contributions; on the contrary, it often means that he is in a position to speak authoritatively on the subject. However, Wikipedians have an ethical duty to mitigate these conflicts of interest.
In the case of an editor's own biography, an essay has already been written and discussed; see Wikipedia:Autobiography. Its Talk page also contains mention of writing about your employer, although no guidance yet exists on this.
The Wikipedia article on Conflict of interest is a great start to understanding this issue. As a first step the conflict should be declared, so that readers and other editors can take it into account in their judgements. So if you contribute to an article about your employer, you should mention in your edit summary or on the article's talk page that you are an employee of the subject company. If you are not prepared to declare your conflict of interest, you should consider recusing from the topic and leaving it to others.
When you do chose to declare and contribute, you should give extra attention to Verifiability and NPOV. Do not advertise, as per soapbox point #7 of Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not, and stick to established approaches such as the one for Wikipedia:Companies, corporations and economic information. Give plenty of opportunity for review of the article by other editors who do not share your conflict of interest. If you wish to defend or criticize your company, please do so in other forums, such as a letters to the editor of newspapers. If a social debate exists about your organization, then the existence of the debate must be summarized in the article.
Administrative conflicts
[edit]If while editing articles, an admin suddenly realizes that there is a serious breach of policy on the part of another editor, this does not mean the admin must avoid enforcing the rules. BUT:
- Be careful not to use admin powers to "win" a conflict over something trivial. Be sure it's an important rule, like Wikipedia:NPOV or Wikipedia:No personal attacks.
- To avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, it may be good to avoid further contributions to the article in question (or discussions of it) until another admin has reviewed the situation.