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Reviewing instructions
editCOI submission reviews should take place on the Talk page of the article. Ideally they will be processed in 7-14 days from the submission date to give any editors with an interest in the page an opportunity to comment, without delaying a review excessively. Submissions that are clear-cut corrections, address severe BLP-type issues, or are urgent for another reason should be handled more promptly.
Though there are no formal experience requirements to conduct reviews, editors who are not as experienced in pages about organizations or BLPs are encouraged to ask experienced participants for oversight. Also consider reading What Wikipedia is Not (Organizations), which addresses many of the issues that often arise in COI submissions or the Biographies of living persons policy.
There is one principle criterion for accepting or rejecting a requested edit: Is it an improvement? To verify if a requested change is an improvement or not, the following four-point check-list may be useful:
- Sourcing: Decline changes that use primary sources like the company website, blogs, or press releases inappropriately
- Promotion: Decline changes that add excessive awards, product details or promotional language
- Suppression: Do not accept changes that unreasonably marginalize or remove well-sourced content
- Spin: Do not accept changes that are not a reasonably accurate representation of the source material to the extent that it is misleading to readers.
Please remember to close each request edit with an A for accepted, G for "go ahead" or D for declined. There is additional documentation on accept or decline parameters at Template:edit COI. Reviewers should exercise common sense and good judgement for each review. Some may need only minor or easy changes to make them acceptable. Severe BLP-type problems and errors should be corrected when pointed out, even if the submitter's proposed replacement is not acceptable. Reviewers should not feel obligated to provide extensive customer service, by for example, completely re-writing an unacceptable proposed content addition.