Wikipedia's conflict-of-interest policy is the single most common reason agency-built pages end up in the deletion log. Notability gets the headlines, but COI is where the cleanup happens — pages that survived for a year quietly get deleted in the week after an editor is identified as undisclosed paid; account histories link back to companies whose names then appear in public Sockpuppet Investigation case files; and the consequences travel from the specific page to every other contribution the same editor made.
The policy itself is simpler than the surrounding mythology. WP:COI is a behavioural guideline. WP:PAID is a Wikimedia Foundation Terms of Use requirement. Together they say: if you have a financial, personal, or close relationship to a Wikipedia subject, you should not edit the article directly, and if you're being paid to edit, you must disclose it. That's the whole policy. The complexity is in the application — what counts as a relationship, what disclosure actually looks like in practice, and what the cost is of getting it wrong.
This piece covers what the policy says (factually), what disclosure looks like on the surface and underneath, the most common mistakes that get pages burned, and exactly how we comply on every project. The honest framing: we sell Wikipedia work, and we'd rather lose a sale than do an undisclosed project. The reasoning will be clear by the end.
What WP:COI says, in plain English
The conflict-of-interest guideline at WP:COI identifies three categories of relationship that create a conflict: financial (you're paid by, employed by, or have ownership in the subject); personal (the subject is a relative, close friend, or someone you have a personal stake in); and close-relationship (you're a longtime collaborator, frequent contractor, ideological ally, or otherwise so closely involved that your editing wouldn't be independent).
When any of these apply, WP:COI says you should:
- Disclose the relationship publicly — on your editor user page, on the relevant article's talk page, and in edit summaries.
- Refrain from direct edits to the article in question. Instead, propose changes on the article's talk page using
{{request edit}}and let an independent editor implement them. - Recuse entirely from contentious editorial decisions about the subject — disputes, deletion discussions, content reversions.
The paid-editing rule at WP:PAID is stricter and isn't a guideline but a Terms of Use obligation imposed by the Wikimedia Foundation. Any editor receiving compensation for edits — direct payment, employment, contracts — must disclose the employer, the client, and any other beneficial party on each affected article. The disclosure is mandatory; failure to disclose is itself a Terms of Use violation, independent of whether the edits themselves were policy-compliant.
A useful distinction: WP:COI is about behaviour, WP:PAID is about disclosure. A paid editor who discloses correctly and proposes edits through talk-page requests is fully policy-compliant. A paid editor who edits silently violates WP:PAID even if their edits would otherwise have been fine. Disclosure is the structural protection that keeps the rest of the work legitimate.
The three layers of COI in practice
The categorical distinctions get clearer with examples.
Financial COI is the broadest and most common. It covers obvious cases (you're paid by an agency, you're an employee, you're an investor) and less-obvious ones (you're an unpaid contractor, you're paid in equity, you're employed by an affiliate, you're a long-term consultant who hasn't taken money recently but has a renewal coming). The threshold is whether a reasonable observer would expect your editing to be influenced by the financial relationship — and the answer is almost always yes if any compensation is involved, including indirect or deferred.
Personal COI covers relationships outside the workplace: family members, romantic partners, close friends, collaborators on unrelated projects, mentors or mentees. The relevant question is whether an outside reader would expect bias. Editing a Wikipedia article about your sister's startup is COI even if you have no financial stake. So is editing the article on a podcast you appear on regularly, an academic department where your spouse teaches, or a company where your university roommate is now CEO.
Close-relationship COI is the catch-all. It covers long-term collaborators, frequent collaborators on unrelated projects, ideological allies, members of organisations you're heavily involved in, and people with whom your professional reputation is intertwined. The classic example: a fan-account editor who's been writing about the same artist for ten years, has never been paid but has built personal relationships with the artist's team, and now can't realistically claim editorial distance. The COI is real even though no money has changed hands.
In every case, the policy response is the same: disclose, recuse from direct edits, propose changes through talk pages. The category determines the disclosure language but not the underlying duty.
What disclosure actually looks like
Disclosure is not a single act. It's three artefacts that have to exist on three different surfaces.
The editor user page declaration. Every paid editor maintains a personal Wikipedia user page (e.g. User:JaneSmith) where their paid-editing disclosure lives. The standard format names the employer (the agency, if any), the client (the end company), and the end-beneficiary if different. It lists the specific articles being edited. It includes a link to the editor's agency or freelancer profile. This page is permanent, public, and indexed — anyone reading any article the editor touched can click through to the user page and see the disclosure in thirty seconds.
The article talk-page declaration. At the point of creating or first editing a page, the editor adds a notice to the article's talk page using a standard template — typically {{connected contributor (paid)}} — naming themselves, their employer, and their client. The talk-page notice serves as a permanent record on the article itself; even if the article changes hands or the editor stops working on it, the disclosure stays attached to its history.
Edit-summary tagging. Every edit to the article carries an edit summary that includes a notation indicating paid status — typically (paid) or similar — so the disclosure is visible in the article's version history. A reader scrolling through the edit log can see which edits were made by a paid editor without having to cross-reference the user page.
The combined effect: anyone investigating the article — a reviewer, an administrator, a journalist, a competitor — can find the disclosure in any of three places in under a minute. That's the standard. Anything less is non-compliance.
The most common mistakes that get pages deleted
In our intake calls, we hear the same five COI mistakes over and over. Each one ends pages.
Sock-puppet accounts. The most common deliberate violation. An agency registers a new Wikipedia account that doesn't disclose paid editing, uses it to create or edit the client's page, and treats the lack of disclosure as a feature rather than a bug. The strategy fails because Wikipedia's checkuser administrators have sophisticated tools for linking accounts (IP overlap, editing patterns, behavioural fingerprints), and once one sock-puppet account is identified, the others usually follow in days. The result: account block, page deletion, and a public Sockpuppet Investigation case that names the agency and frequently the end client. We've seen entire agency portfolios collapse this way — twenty client pages deleted within a week of one editor being identified.
Employee accounts editing employer pages without disclosure. Almost as common as sock-puppetry, less malicious but equally fatal. An employee in marketing or communications opens a Wikipedia account, edits the company's own page to update product information or correct what they see as errors, and never declares the COI. The pattern is highly detectable — editors with single-purpose accounts editing one company's article are flagged by automated tools — and the consequences track the same path: account block, COI tag on the article, often a full audit of the article's history that surfaces problems going back years.
"Consultant" accounts writing about clients silently. A common pattern with freelance Wikipedia editors and small agencies. The editor takes on client work, edits silently to "avoid drawing attention," and rationalises non-disclosure as protecting client confidentiality. The Wikimedia Foundation does not accept this rationalisation. Confidentiality is not a permitted reason to skip disclosure under WP:PAID; the Terms of Use are explicit. Hidden paid editing identified after the fact gets the editor blocked and the client's pages tagged or deleted.
Mixing personal and paid edits on one account. Editors who genuinely contribute to Wikipedia in non-paid areas and then take on paid work and edit it from the same account without changing their disclosure get caught up in the same problem. The paid-editing standard isn't graduated by how much non-paid contribution the editor has otherwise made. Either every paid project is disclosed on the user page or the editor is non-compliant.
Volunteer accounts taking on paid work without updating disclosure. A variant of the above. An editor has been contributing to Wikipedia for years, joins an agency or takes on a freelance Wikipedia contract, and forgets — or chooses not — to add a paid-editing declaration to their user page. The new paid work then violates WP:PAID retroactively from the moment compensation began, and any earlier non-paid edits get re-examined for hidden COI.
The pattern across all five: non-disclosure looks easier in the short term and is catastrophically more expensive over the project's lifetime. The cheapest path is to disclose from day one, accept the slight friction of having paid status visible, and build the page in a way that survives because there's nothing to discover.
How WikiBusines complies — the full structure
Every project we take on follows the same disclosure structure. There are no exceptions, including for clients who would prefer otherwise. The framework:
Each editor maintains a permanent user-page declaration naming WikiBusines as the employer, listing the standing client engagement (if applicable), and including a link to our company information. The declaration is public and searchable; you can find it by clicking the editor's username on any page they've touched.
Each new article (or significant existing-article edit) carries a talk-page declaration using the {{connected contributor (paid)}} template, naming the editor, WikiBusines, and the client. This is added at the point of creation and stays on the talk page permanently.
Each edit carries an edit-summary tag indicating paid status. The convention varies slightly across language editions but is always visible in the version history.
Agency, client, and end-beneficiary are all named — even when there's a chain (a PR agency hires us, who hires an editor, on behalf of a client whose ultimate corporate parent is elsewhere). The Terms of Use require disclosure of all beneficial parties, not just the immediate one, and we maintain this chain in writing.
We refuse projects that require hidden relationships. Periodically a prospective client asks us to do the work without disclosing on the talk page, or to use a "neutral-looking" editor without a paid declaration. We say no. The work isn't legal under the Terms of Use, the page won't last, and our editors' reputations don't survive the kind of investigation that surfaces when one of those pages gets caught. We'd rather decline the project. This is the honest framing for any operator: if disclosure feels like a sales-process obstacle, that's because the alternative is structural fraud against the platform, and the consequences fall on the client as well as the agency.
The full disclosure framework, including the exact templates and account-page formats, is described under Wikipedia page creation, and the policy commitments are written into our guarantees page.
The cost of getting this wrong
For a client deciding whether disclosure is worth the slight reduction in editorial freedom it implies, the math is straightforward.
A correctly disclosed page edited by a paid editor under WP:PAID is editorially constrained but durable. It can carry inconvenient facts (the company's name, a clear description of what it does, neutral coverage of any controversies). What it cannot carry is promotional language, unverified claims, or content sourced primarily from the company itself. In return, it has a fair shot at surviving for years — Wikipedia statistics suggest most articles, once they survive the first six months, persist for the long haul.
A non-disclosed page edited by a sock-puppet or undisclosed employee account is editorially unconstrained in the short term and structurally unstable. Until it's caught, it can carry whatever the client wanted. When it's caught — and the relevant timescales run from weeks to a few years — the article is tagged, often deleted, and frequently the company's name appears in the public investigation case. The page goes; the reputation damage stays.
A real example from our intake calls: a B2B SaaS company that hired an unnamed agency in 2022, got a Wikipedia page that read favourably, and was thrilled with the result. In 2024 the editor who created it was identified as undisclosed paid through a checkuser investigation; the editor was blocked indefinitely; the page (and four other client pages by the same editor) was deleted; and the investigation case file — now permanently public on Wikipedia — names the agency, the editor, and the affected companies. The client now appears in Google search results above the fold under "[Company name] Wikipedia sockpuppet" queries, three years on. The original page would have cost them around €6,000 done correctly with disclosure. The reputational cost of the alternative is open-ended and not recoverable. Our press archive is on the site partly to make this point: any agency that wants your trust should be willing to show its own track record, and the work it puts its name on should be work that can sustain inspection.
What to verify before hiring any operator
The questions to ask any agency — including ours — before signing:
- Send me the user-page URL of the editor who will create the article. A real agency can. The page will show a paid-editing declaration, list the clients (or refer to them by category if confidentiality matters), and link back to the agency.
- Show me the talk-page disclosure template you use. It should be
{{connected contributor (paid)}}or the equivalent in the relevant language edition. - Walk me through your edit-summary convention. Every edit should carry a tag that makes paid status visible in the version history.
- Confirm that agency, client, and end-beneficiary are all named. No undisclosed beneficial parties anywhere in the chain.
- Read me your policy on refusing non-disclosure requests. If the agency would do the work hidden if you asked, the answer determines whether their disclosure on your project is genuine or pragmatic. Honest operators have a hard line.
The corresponding answers from the agencies that get pages deleted: vague references to "established editor accounts" they can't link, "we handle the disclosure side internally" with no specifics, edit summaries with no tagging, beneficial parties who don't appear in the disclosure chain, and a willingness to "be flexible" on disclosure for the right client. Any of these is a structural signal the project will end badly. The nine-warning-signs guide goes through the broader pattern.
The honest summary: COI compliance is the foundation under everything else. A page built on disclosure can carry the rest of the project's risk; a page built on hidden COI propagates risk into the client's reputation indefinitely. There is no version of this where shortcuts pay off long-term. The math always lands the same way.
Want us to walk through your existing Wikipedia presence — the article, the editor's history, the disclosure chain — and tell you whether it's structurally safe? Email team@wikibusines.com and we'll send back an honest read.