Bharatpedia:Conflict of interest
![]() | This page documents Bharatpedia behavioral guideline. It is a generally accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow, though it is best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply. Any substantive edit to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page. |
![]() | This page in a nutshell: Do not edit Bharatpedia in your own interests, nor in the interests of your external relationships. |
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Conflict of interest (COI) editing involves contributing to Bharatpedia about yourself, family, friends, clients, employers, or your financial and other relationships. Any external relationship can trigger a conflict of interest. Someone having a conflict of interest is a description of a situation, not a judgment about that person's opinions, integrity, or good faith.
COI editing is strongly discouraged on Bharatpedia. It undermines public confidence and risks causing public embarrassment to the individuals and companies being promoted. Editors with a COI are sometimes unaware of whether or how much it has influenced their editing. If COI editing causes disruption, an administrator may opt to place blocks on the involved accounts.
Editors with a COI, including paid editors, are expected to disclose it whenever they seek to change an affected article's content. Anyone editing for pay must disclose who is paying them, who the client is, and any other relevant affiliation; this is a requirement of the Bharatmedia Foundation. COI editors are strongly discouraged from editing affected articles directly, and can propose changes on article talk pages instead. However, our policy on matters relating to living people allows very obvious errors to be fixed quickly, including by the subject.
When investigating COI editing, do not reveal the identity of editors against their wishes. Bharatpedia's policy against harassment, and in particular the prohibition against disclosing personal information, takes precedence over this guideline. To report COI editing, follow the advice at How to handle conflicts of interest, below. Editors making or discussing changes to this guideline or related guidance shall disclose whether they have been paid to edit Bharatpedia.
Bharatpedia's position[edit]
Purpose of Bharatpedia[edit]
As an encyclopedia, Bharatpedia's mission is to provide the public with articles that summarize accepted knowledge, written neutrally and sourced reliably. Readers expect to find neutral articles written independently of their subject, not corporate or personal webpages, or platforms for advertising and self-promotion. Articles should contain only material that complies with Bharatpedia's content policies and best practices, and Bharatpedians must place the interests of the encyclopedia and its readers above personal concerns.
COI editing[edit]
Editors with a COI should follow Bharatpedia policies and best practices scrupulously:
- you should disclose your COI when involved with affected articles;
- you are strongly discouraged from editing affected articles directly;
- you may propose changes on talk pages;
- you should put new articles through the Articles for Creation (AfC) process instead of creating them directly;
- you should not act as a reviewer of affected article(s) at AfC, new pages patrol or elsewhere;
- you should respect other editors by keeping discussions concise.
Note that no one on Bharatpedia controls articles. If Bharatpedia hosts an article about you or your organization, others may add information that would otherwise remain little known. They may also decide to delete the article or decide to keep it should you later request deletion. The media has several times drawn attention to companies that engage in COI editing on Bharatpedia, which has led to embarrassment for the organization concerned.
Paid editing[edit]
An editor has a financial conflict of interest when they write about a topic with which they have a close financial relationship. This includes being an owner, employee, contractor, investor or other stakeholder.
Being paid to contribute to Bharatpedia is one form of financial COI; it places the paid editor in a conflict between their employer's goals and our goals. The kind of paid editing of most concern to the community involves using Bharatpedia for public relations and marketing purposes. Sometimes called "paid advocacy", this is problematic because it invariably reflects the interests of the client or employer.
Bharatpedia requires that all paid editing be disclosed and you must provide links on your user-page to all active accounts on external websites through which you advertise, solicit or obtain paid editing. If you receive or expect to receive compensation (money, goods or services) for your contributions to Bharatpedia, the policy on Bharatpedia is:
- you must disclose who is paying you, on whose behalf the edits are made, and any other relevant affiliation;
- you should make the disclosure on your user page, on affected talk pages, and whenever you discuss the topic;
- you are strongly discouraged from editing affected articles directly;
- you may propose changes on talk pages;
- you should put new articles through the Articles for Creation (AfC) process instead of creating them directly;
- you must not act as a reviewer of affected article(s) at AfC, new pages patrol or elsewhere;
- you should respect volunteers by keeping discussions concise.
Requested edits are subject to the same standards as any other, and editors may decline to act on them. To find an article's talk page, click the "talk" button at the top of the article. If you are an administrator, you must not use administrative tools for any paid-editing activity.
How to disclose a COI[edit]
General COI[edit]
If you become involved in an article where you have any COI, you should always let other editors know about it, whenever and wherever you discuss the topic. There are three venues to do this.
1. If you want to use a template to do this, place {{connected contributor}}
at the top of the affected talk page, fill it in as follows, and save:
Connected contributor template
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Note that someone else may add this for you.
2. You can also make a statement in the edit summary of any COI contribution.
3. If you want to note the COI on your user page, you can use the {{UserboxCOI}}
template:
UserboxCOI template
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Edit the source of your user page and type |
Also, if you propose significant or potentially controversial changes to an affected article, you can use the {{request edit}}
template. Place this at the bottom of the talk page and state your suggestion beneath it (be sure to sign it with four tildes, ~~~~). If the proposal is verifiable and appropriate, it will usually be accepted. If it is declined, the editor declining the request will usually add an explanation below your entry.
Paid editors[edit]
If you are being paid for your contributions to Bharatpedia, you must declare who is paying you, who the client is, and any other relevant role or relationship. You may do this on your user page, on the talk page of affected articles, or in your edit summaries. As you have a conflict of interest, you must ensure everyone with whom you interact is aware of your paid status, in all discussions on Bharatpedia pages within any namespace. If you want to use a template to disclose your COI on a talk page, place {{connected contributor (paid)}}
at the top of the page, fill it in as follows, and save:
Connected contributor (paid) template
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The employer is whoever is paying you to be involved in the article (such as a PR company). The client is on whose behalf the payment is made (usually the subject of the article). If the employer and client are the same entity—that is, if Acme Corporation is paying you to write about Acme Corporation—the client parameter may be left empty. See {{connected contributor (paid)}}
for more information. Note that other editors may add this template for you. Paid editing without such a declaration is called undisclosed paid editing (UPE).
You are expected to maintain a clearly visible list on your user page of your paid contributions. If you advertise, solicit or obtain paid editing work via an account on any external website, you must provide links on your user-page to all such accounts.
If you propose changes to an affected article, you can use the {{request edit}}
template. Post it on the talk page and make your suggestion underneath it.
Templates[edit]
Relevant article talk pages may be tagged with {{connected contributor}}
or {{connected contributor (paid)}}
. The article itself may be tagged with {{COI}}
. A section of an article can be tagged with {{COI|section}}
Other templates include:
{{uw-coi}}
(to be placed on user Talk pages to warn editors that they may have a conflict of interest){{uw-coi-username}}
(another Talk page warning, this one for editors whose username appears to violate the WP:Usernames policy){{COI editnotice}}
(this template goes on article talk pages and gives instructions to COI editors on how to submit edit requests to the article){{User COI}}
(userbox for users to self-declare on their own Userpages those articles with which they have a conflict of interest; userbox can list up to nine articles)
Avoid outing[edit]
When investigating COI editing, the policy against harassment takes precedence. It requires that Bharatpedians not reveal the identity of editors against their wishes. Examine editors' behavior instead and seek advice by email if necessary. Do not ask a user if they are somebody; instead one can ask if they have an undisclosed connection to that person. If revealing private information is needed to resolve COI editing, and if the issue is serious enough to warrant it, editors can email paid-en-bpbharatpedia.org. Also see the section "Reporting to the conflict of interest noticeboard" above.
Dealing with single-purpose accounts[edit]
Accounts that appear to be single-purpose, existing for the sole or primary purpose of promotion or denigration of a person, company, product, service, website, organization, etc., and whose postings are in apparent violation of this guideline, should be made aware of this guideline and warned not to continue their problematic editing. If the same pattern of editing continues after the warning, the account may be blocked.
See also[edit]
Bharatmedia Foundation
- Terms of Use#4. Refraining from Certain Activities
- Sue Gardner, "Press releases/Sue Gardner statement paid advocacy editing", Bharatmedia Foundation, 31 October 2024.
Contact us
Article
Policies
- Bharatpedia:Paid-contribution disclosure
- Bharatpedia:Username policy
- Bharatpedia:What Wikipedia is not
Wikiprojects
Miscellaneous
- Bharatpedia:About you
- Bharatpedia:The Bharatpedia Library/Cultural Professionals
- Category:Bharatpedia conflict of interest edit requests (lists edits for review where proposer has a conflict of interest)
- Category:Bharatpedia articles with possible conflicts of interest
- Bharatpedia:Reward board
- Bharatpedia:FAQ/Article subjects
- User:MuskitBot
- Users creating autobiographies (an edit filter)
- Statement on Bharatpedia from participating communications firms, June 2014
Essays
- Bharatpedia:Best practices for editors with close associations
- Bharatpedia:Conflicts of interest (medicine)
- Bharatpedia:Deceptive advertising
- Bharatpedia:Don't cry COI
- Bharatpedia:For publicists publicizing a client's work
- Bharatpedia:Ghostwriting
- Bharatpedia:Help available for editors with conflicts of interest
- Bharatpedia:Independent sources
- Bharatpedia:Paid editing (essay)
- Bharatpedia:Plain and simple conflict of interest guide
- Bharatpedia:Public relations (essay)
- Bharatpedia:Search engine optimization
- Bharatpedia:Bharatpedia is in the real world
Historical
- Bharatpedia:WikiProject Cooperation (defunct)
- Bharatpedia community discussion on paid editing, 2009, sparked by discovery that admin/crat/OTRS editor was editing for pay
- Bharatpedia community discussion on conflict of interest, 2012.
- Bharatpedia:COI+ (failed proposal, 21 February 2013)
- Commercial editing (failed policy proposal turned into an essay, November 2013)
- No paid advocacy (failed policy proposal, November 2013)
- Paid editing policy proposal (failed policy proposal, November 2013)
- Conflict of interest limit (failed policy proposal, December 2013)
Further reading[edit]
- (chronological)
- Davis, Michael (1982). "Conflict of Interest", Business and Professional Ethics Journal, 1(4), pp. 17–27 (influential). doi:10.5840/bpej1982149
- Luebke, Neil R. (1987). "Conflict of Interest as a Moral Category," Business & Professional Ethics Journal, 6, pp. 66–81. JSTOR 27799930 (influential)
- Davis, Michael (Winter 1993). "Conflict of Interest Revisited," Business & Professional Ethics Journal, 12(4), pp. 21–41. JSTOR 27800924
- Stark, Andrew (2003). Conflict of Interest in American Public Life, Harvard University Press.
- Carson, Thomas L. (January 2004). "Conflicts of Interest and Self-Dealing in the Professions: A Review Essay," Business Ethics Quarterly, 14(1), pp. 161–182. JSTOR 3857777
- Krimsky, Sheldon (2006). "The Ethical and Legal Foundations of Scientific 'Conflict of Interest'", in Trudo Lemmings and Duff R. Waring (eds.), Law and Ethics in Biomedical Research: Regulation, Conflict of Interest, and Liability, University of Toronto Press.
- McDonald, Michael (23 April 2006). "Ethics and Conflict of Interest", The W. Maurice Young Center for Applied Ethics, University of British Columbia.