User talk:Discuss-Dubious/article influence

One idea

I don't know if it is necessarily a good idea to mention, but one thing that editors with a COI might do is just start an article with perhaps a sentence or two and as many references as meet WP:RS as they can think of, and then just drop a message at the COIN or similar that they have a COI on the topic but have started a page and would like it fleshed out by others? John Carter (talk) 19:20, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

Okay, and this is something you want them doing, right? It looks good enough. Discuss-Dubious (t/c) 14:03, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

@Anthonyhcole: Suggested I comment here as an ethical paid editor that consults 100+ article-subjects a year. Regarding the guide, we have a lot of documents and essays already with conflicting advice and I think making more documents only confuses things further. Plus, most article-subjects will never read or understand all these essays and guidelines that are often in Wikipedia jargon or extremely long. Personally I would suggest WP:COI have a section for "Article-subjects and their affiliates" using a WP:Summary Style approach with a separate guide for article-subjects, their PR staff, and others in the category. Then some program should be developed to educate article-subjects and PR staff in real-life.

Regarding general advice, my advice is to abstain from contributing to an article about you, your client or employer in most cases. My own data suggests the article-subject's objectives conflict with Wikipedia's content policies in approximately 70% of cases. The general rule of thumb should be to abstain, but if you meet one of several exceptions you should (a) Disclose your conflict of interest (b) Make sure your edits are supported by the community (c) Do your best to make the same contributions you would make if you were not affiliated with the organization. Those exceptions under which participation is warranted include things like factual errors, an unfair article or attack-piece, or being able to contribute neutrally despite your COI.

CorporateM (Talk) 15:08, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

Thank you CorporateM! I didn't want this to be exclusively COI-related, rather an ersatz solution based on Jayen466's comments here. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Discuss-Dubious (talk • contribs) 02:12, 30 March 2015 (UTC)