Wikipedia:Hints on dealing with conflict of interest problems

Introduction

Based on experiences working the Wikipedia Conflict of Interest Noticeboard, some notes on common problems and what to do about them.

Working on articles with COI problems requires good researching and writing. It's a form of article repair. Sources will need to be checked, and searches made for new sources to find omitted material.

There's a division of labor between WP:COIN and WP:AN/I. Most COI problems (maybe 80%) can be handled by discussions with the COI editor and article edits. Sometimes that doesn't work, and the matter requires asking at AN/I to borrow the big hammer and stop an editor from doing something. In the other direction, COI problems sometimes come up at AN/I which require article repair after the editor behavior has been restrained by admins. Those can be brought to COIN.

If you can get a COI editor to talk about what they're doing, that's a big step forward. Many people have no clue how Wikipedia works, and think it's like a blog with open commenting. Try to aim them at Wikipedia's introduction articles without angering them. About half of COI problems seem to come from people who just need to understand more about how Wikipedia works.

The other half know how Wikipedia works, and are trying to make it work for them. Some just need talk comments and some pushback to keep them from turning an article into a PR piece. Some need stronger measures.

Pop culture

In the popular culture industries, careers are made and broken by promotion. People in those fields work hard to promote themselves. This often spills over onto Wikipedia.

Musicians and DJs.

The number one DJ in southeastern Montana!

Promotion in this area is so common that notability policy is quite rigid. See WP:MUSIC. Inflation of someone's role in a successful project is common - backup singers, chorus members, recording engineers, and people who appeared on the same show as someone famous such often try to expand their role. Check references. Watch for name-dropping. "Performed with" followed by a list of big names is common. That's a form of peacocking, per WP:PEACOCK.

Actors and movies

Look at me! I'm a star!

As with musicians, Wikipedia has well defined criteria on notability. See WP:ACTOR. For US productions, this is straightforward to check. Screen credit in US movies are regulated by the craft unions in the industry, and IMDB cross-checks with them. Non-US productions are more difficult to check, but somewhere on Wikipedia there will be a film buff who's into Nollywood or Hong Kong martial arts movies and knows how to check.

Self-published films are common, and a problem. They need free promotion, and Wikipedia is free. They're clearly not notable until released, and need some good reviews from good reviewers to be notable. Watch for awards from non-notable film festivals.

Watch for resume inflation. There will often be a long filmography, and some early roles may be non-speaking parts or extra work. COI editors will sometimes create articles for the film, each actor, the director, the producer, and the prop master's cat if not restrained. Merging and trimming can help.

There have been completely phony articles intended to establish a back story for a horror film. Those must be deleted and the matter brought up at WP:AN/I for a block of the offending user.

Companies and products

Companies

Company article problems come in a few main forms.

Marginal notability

We're going to be really big, real soon now!

This is the company that's almost, or just barely, notable. This will often be a startup trying to get attention. Sometimes, WP:TOOSOON can be helpful. WP:CORP, which sets a reasonably high threshold, always applies. These can be close calls. This is one of the more common cases where paid editing by a third party is involved. One can find ads on freelance services for creating such articles on Wikipedia.

Such articles often have many references, but on close inspection, most of them will be weak. They'll be to the company's own web site, blogs, sites which accept promotional articles, or entries in lists in major publications. As usual, WP:RS applies.

Happy talk

Everything is just great. We are all very happy here. Everybody likes us. We donate to charity. We don't talk about the product recall, the losses, the bankruptcy, or the criminal prosecution.

This is usually a large-company problem. Often, there will be an editor with a declared conflict of interest editing on behalf of the company. They probably write well and add good references. It's what they don't put in that's the problem.

Balancing such an article requires research. Look for articles about the company that mention lawsuits, recalls, losses, or bankruptcies. Write like a business publication aimed at investors, such as Bloomberg or the Wall Street Journal. They cover the bad stuff investors need to know about. They're good sources for negative info needed to counter the happy talk.

Watch for peacocking. Big blocks of text about the company's charitable or ecological activities are common. Those can often be trimmed down, but not deleted entirely. Long lists of awards should be checked. Many awards aren't notable, or are easy to get. Ones from industry associations are questionable, especially if there are lots of award categories and levels so that almost everyone gets something. Award nominations are seldom worth a mention.

Products

Feature lists and such

Our product comes in 52 great flavors, and here's a paragraph about each delicious flavor!

These articles tend to read like ads. They often need a lot of trimming. Long feature lists, references to blogs, and marketing adjectives can be removed. Check for copyright violations; often the hype comes straight from advertising copy. (The copyright-violation detection bots often catch the really blatant cases of this.) Also check images for proper copyright tags; if there's obvious commercial imagery tagged as "own work", that has to be dealt with. Note that it's just fine for a COI editor representing a company to release an image to Wikipedia if they're willing to give up the rights Wikipedia requires. Doing that right requires an ORTS ticket. (Is there a user talk template on how to do that? There should be.)

As with company articles, look for the negative stuff that COI editors somehow rarely mention.

Related products

Our product is totally different than all those other similar products!

From an encyclopaedic perspective, it's better to have one article about a generic technology listing its variants than one article for each company's slightly different product. Combining narrow product articles into a more general article improves Wikipedia. Writing in a compare-and-contrast style is helpful to readers. This is a useful way to deal with COI product articles - merge them with articles about the competition.

Real estate

Our design is an integration of volumes that flow into each other and, following a coherent formal language, create the sensibility of the building's overall ensemble.

That's from an Wikipedia article about a condo for sale in New York City. Obviously, that language had to go. The article survived an AfD, because it had so much press coverage in the New York real estate press that it had become notable. It was, though, toned down to a bare description of the property and some references. For buildings under construction or proposed, WP:CRYSTAL applies. Unless the building is a really big deal, wait for completion. Wikipedia and the building will still be here. An amusing exception is a large mall in New Jersey, which, after two decades, three bankruptcies, and a roof collapse, may open Real Soon Now. It's notable for being a disaster of a project. There, a COI editor inserted much PR-like material written in the present tense, as if the mall were actually open. That had to go.

Biographical articles

Resume inflation

I'm the chief under-assistant blameshifter at MegaCorp!

Here, the usual Wikipedia criteria apply - it's not what you have to say about yourself, it's what other reliable sources say about you.

There have been cases of blatant resume inflation, with phony degrees. In one case, someone claimed a doctorate from a two-year trade school.

Look for vague academic affiliations being inflated. It's not hard for anyone with a decent track record to get a non-paying position with a vague title at a major university. Nor does it mean much. Affiliations with non-accredited institutions are suspect.

References to self-published publications should be deleted, unless others have reviewed them or they've attracted some significant attention. This includes articles in magazines which accept articles of the form "Why X is great, by Y at X".

WP:BLP applies. Negative information must be very well sourced.

Awards need to be reasonably notable. Awards from industry associations are iffy. If the award has an article of its own, that's a good indication of notability. Award nominations usually aren't worth a mention.

Rich crooks with PR people

I'm completely reformed now, and a big hit on the charity luncheon circuit. Let's forget about the time I did in the Federal pen.

This is a real thing. There are at least four articles on Wikipedia where a wealthy convicted felon has a paid editor. These articles are a pain to deal with. The paid editor often tries to delete information about the criminal career. Emphasize hard facts. Cite the criminal activities to the best possible sources. Trim the peacocking. There will probably be images uploaded by the COI editor. Trimming images down to a headshot in a photo editor is sometimes necessary. Images of the subject speaking to a group are not generally helpful to articles.

In general, only convictions should be mentioned, not arrests. Convictions overturned on appeal are a judgement call; if there was extensive publicity and controversy, documented in reliable sources, it's part of history and mentionable.

Famous for being famous

It's all about ME!

This comes up with "shock jocks", people who create hoaxes to get attention, and related annoyances. If being famous for being famous works for you, you don't need to put your own article into Wikipedia. If the fame thing isn't working out, Wikipedia can't help you get there. Heavy self-promotion requires heavy citations from high-quality reliable sources to get into Wikipedia. If, five years out, they're forgotten, they probably shouldn't get an article. See WP:BLP1E.

Some unusual cases

Sometimes the COI problems are amusing. At one point, there was an edit war over an article about one of the old-line British "public" (i.e. private) schools. The school administration was promoting the school as training young people for the modern world, stressing their new buildings and their computer and technology classes. The "old boys" wanted to reminisce about the good old days of hazing, cold showers, Latin classes, stone buildings hundreds of years old, and famous alumni. This was more funny than serious.

One of the worst COI problems in years involved a "binary options" broker/gambling house. They didn't like Wikipedia reporting in detail on their problems with US regulators, which had resulted in them being kicked out of the US and on trial for violations of securities laws. They had multiple COI editors, offered large sums of money to anyone who could "fix" their Wikipedia article, and edit warred for weeks. After several long and difficult discussions on WP:AN/I, the COI editors were all blocked, and the article mentions their illegal activities.