Wikipedia talk:FAQ/Organizations

No AfD participation

We should tell people not to participate in AfD's of articles where they are the subject. That's part of the COI guideline. People also shouldn't edit their own articles. Yeah, some non-controversial edits are OK, like fixing spelling and reverting obvious vandalism, but with AfD, nothing good comes from having the subject argue their own notability. Jehochman ^Hablar 06:40, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

• I wouldn't go that far. Yes, it's going to be a problem if they bicker with every participant, but they are allowed to produce an argument against deletion, especially if they can make it based on Wikipedia policy. --W.marsh 12:44, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

• No, it's not banned. From WP:COI:

Wikipedia is "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit," but if you have a conflict of interest avoid, or exercise great caution when:

1. Editing articles related to you, your organization, or its competitors, as well as projects and products they are involved with,
2. Participating in deletion discussions about articles related to your organization or its competitors,
3. Linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see Wikipedia:Spam);

   and you must always:

4. Avoid breaching relevant policies and guidelines, especially neutral point of view, verifiability, and autobiography.

I would avoid taking an overly negative or aggressive tone. I would rather us try to work with these people and show them how they can help us, rather than scaring them off and making them use more underhand tactics. Kamryn Matika 13:37, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

Indeed, I wrote some of the above text. I'll try to strike a better balance. Jehochman ^Hablar 15:17, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

Great job

I've changed this from an essay to an FAQ page and linked it into the other FAQ pages. There is a real need for this page. The essay tag made it look like something that can be ignored. I don't think there is anything controversial on this page, it just restates policies and guidelines found elsewhere. It should be linked wherever appropriate. -- ☑ SamuelWantman 07:57, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

Wow - looking good :) I love Wikipedia! Being able to knock something up in twenty minutes and then have a bunch of other people come along and improve my work of their own accord is the best. I'm hoping more people who deal with this kind of user frequently will come along and add other stuff that commonly comes up. I think the next stop now is making this page as visible as possible to the right people. Kamryn Matika 14:00, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

Business, Business', Businesses or Businesses'?

I've renamed this as "Business'" in line with the other plural possessive FAQs. Business can be used as a plural, and "Business'" would be pronounced "biznesses". If we used the possessive of the alternate plural "businesses" that would lead to "biznesseses". I've never come up against this usage question before. Anyone know what the acceptable plural possessive is for "Business"? -- ☑ SamuelWantman 09:47, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

Visibility

Based on the AN/I thread, this FAQ will hopefully actually answer FAQs without the need of e-mailing OTRS. So, I think we should make sure those people have a reasonable chance of seeing this page when heading towards OTRS. When ready, this page should be linked to prominently from Wikipedia:Contact us/Article problem/Factual error (from enterprise), which seems to be where you'd end up if you were a COI and clicked on "Contact us". --W.marsh 12:45, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

We can also make a "corporation template" and put it in talk pages of articles about corporations (similar to BLP articles). That template would redirect user to this instruction.Biophys 13:36, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

Contradictions between company web site and independent sources

We should tell in FAC that in the case of such contradictions, we are going to use independent secondary sources about the company (which satisfy WP:SOURCE) rather than information that company provides itself.Biophys 13:29, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

Repetitions

The sections "Why doesn't Wikipedia have an article on my company?" and "I think my company deserves an article on Wikipedia but none exists. What can I do?" cover very similar ground (even their titles are similar). Anyone mind if I try merging them?

This is a great article and (I hope) will save us a lot of repetitive explanation. Raymond Arritt 18:11, 30 June 2007 (UTC)

I think they're different... but perhaps "How do I create an article?" should be trimmed for redundancy. From what I recall OTRS gets a lot of outright demands that Wikipedia write an article for some random company or business venture, as odd as that sounds... this seems like something the FAQ should clearly address. --W.marsh 00:37, 1 July 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. Now that you explained it, I see. I'll add just a few words to try to make the reasoning clearer. Raymond Arritt 01:31, 1 July 2007 (UTC)

Examples of good articles and featured articles about corporations

Wikipedia:FAQ/Organizations does not seem to direct the reader to examples of good articles or featured articles about businesses. WP:GA#Businesses groups several good articles about businesses together; WP:FA, on the other hand, has articles about businesses appearing under several different headings. I think it would be helpful to include a list of links to articles about businesses which have attained good or featured rank. That should give the reader concrete examples to help him or her understand the sometimes abstract policies and guidelines. For all we know, businesspeople who want to create articles about their businesses on Wikipedia may have only viewed a few articles, perhaps of low quality (for example, articles by and about their competitors, which for all we know might have escaped scrutiny thus far). Since only a tiny fraction of articles on Wikipedia are good or featured, articles that turn up under random browsing will usually have problems, and may mislead someone who assumes those articles fully exemplify what Wikipedia is trying to be. --Teratornis 22:56, 30 June 2007 (UTC)

If we were to point someone to a good or featured article about a business, it should be with a caveat that the articles were written by many community members, working together. We should not give the impression that good or featured articles about businesses are often written by people who represent the company. Is there any business article that you are aware of where a representative of the company participated in the creation or editing of the article, and there contributions were accepted without controversy? That might be a useful example to highlight. -- ☑ SamuelWantman 00:38, 1 July 2007 (UTC)

• I think that's a good idea... from recent experience trying to submit work in good faith to another site, and it kept getting rejected for vague reasons, I just felt like "Well if you'd show me something acceptable then I'd know what to do". A question could be like 'What would an acceptable article look like?' or something along those lines. I created a "good idea, bad idea" table like this in a minor essay I wrote at User:W.marsh/Blatant advertising. --W.marsh 00:40, 1 July 2007 (UTC)

A missing FAQ

I believe there is a missing FAQ: "My boss told me to advertise our business on Wikipedia. How do I do that?" or "I'm (so and so) in the Marketing Dept. of (some company) and I want to advertise our business. What do I do?" In other words, I feel there should be a FAQ entry specifically for marketing people that tells them that Wikipedia is not a bulletin board for advertisements. The last FAQ listed ("What can I upload?") gets into the PR thing, but I don't think a PR person would look at the "What can I upload?" title and read what it says. Perhaps, it can be retitled "Can I advertise my company? What can I upload?" -- Kainaw^(what?) 02:50, 1 July 2007 (UTC)

I added this at the beginning, as it is perhaps the most important thing we need to state. It's a bit short and to the point though - feel free to reword. Kamryn Matika 03:34, 1 July 2007 (UTC)

Excellent!

Wikipedia has really needed this. Kudos to the editors who created it. IPSOS (talk) 23:10, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

proposed addition

I think something people wonder is "How do I work with Wikipedia on an article about me or my company?" or something similar. As Wikipedia grows it's not realistic for us to expect people to just stand by and have no say in articles about them, so we should explain constructive, helpful ways people with a "conflict of interest" can participate in Wikipedia. It's a bit naive to say "don't edit the article, just propose changes on the talk page" - anecdotal evidence suggests this doesn't often result in the desired edits being made, even if they're good edits. I'm a bit stumped as to the best way overall to work on an article where you have a COI, other than just citing everything to published sources, which might be a bit tough for new users. Any thoughts? --W.marsh 01:42, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

• Or maybe this is already covered... sort of, over questions 2,3,4 and 5. --W.marsh 01:49, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

Two possibilities: Wikipedia:Bounty board and Wikipedia:Reward board. --Teratornis (talk) 16:39, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Great idea, but needs more stuff on images

I had been thinking for a long time we needed a page like this and was going to propose it, until I stumbled across this. It's what we need for these situations, which we're having more and more of.

However ...

We need to explain our licensing policy much better re images. Many companies upload their logos, which cannot take the GFDL unless they change the licensing on the original logo. But as written, a PR person could easily be led to think they can just license it under the GFDL. Logos are on the fair-use whitelist, but as such they need two tags:{{logo}} and {{fair use rationale}}. The latter needs to be filled out as well.

Also, logos need to be low-res to comply with the fair-use criteria. We also prefer they be in .PNG or .SVG format (although there are some who think we should refuse the latter because the scalability defeats the purpose of keeping them low-res).

And we should address photos taken of company facilities or products as to how they are impacted by the replaceability rule. Most of the former are going to be considered replaceable (unless, I imagine, they are areas not accessible to the general public, most visitors or even most employees). Most of the latter will be considered replaceable unless the product is either not yet on the market or long since off it.

And another thing: When PR people themselves take photos, it's likely they will legally be works for hire and thus the company, not the PR person, will own the copyright. They need to get some sort of release for this from their lawyers/legal departments.

And then, if they've managed to effectively create a free image, those free images ought to be uploaded to Commons, not here.

I hate to seem to be proposing instruction creep, but since many Wikipedians themselves don't fully understand the new, tighter image policies, we can expect even less of non-Wikipedians. I've already had to explain this to a few corporate people. We have logos and other company-created images all the time that might well be kept but, because of this lack of understanding, are routinely deleted for lacking source, lacking licensing, lacking fair use rationale etc. The new image upload page helps generally but the copyright issues grow more complex with company employees uploading images created by their companies. We need to try to explain them here.

Shall I go ahead and try to draft a question or questions explaining this more perfectly? Daniel Case 15:33, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

I would say yes, but see WP:CFAQ to make sure you are not duplicating content. It's better to link to content rather than duplicate too much of it (because it's hard to maintain multiple copies when policies change). Also, I mildly disagree with several points in WP:CREEP and I would like to write a counterpoint essay, "Do not fear complexity." Wikipedia needs lots of instructions to cover the vast number of situations, problems, and tasks that come up in the course of building the world's largest do-it-yourself collaborative project. Anything that we have to explain more than once belongs in a formal instruction document. Otherwise, we have humans doing the repetition of re-writing and re-thinking instructions every time they use them instead of the easier method of reading or citing a document. We have efficient tools for organizing our instructions, such as these FAQ pages, and the Editor's index. We have efficient tools for searching our instructions, such as {{Google custom}}. We provide near-real-time assistance from actual humans for finding and interpreting instructions, on the Help desk and other instruction pages. The author(s) of WP:CREEP might study the Help desk, to see how we use our instructions to fend off chaos. The fact that Wikipedia has such extensive detailed instructions is fundamental to making Wikipedia work. Of course for a given procedure, we want the instructions to be as efficient as possible, with no wasted steps - we should not "creep" a given procedure with extra steps that are likely to be extraneous. But we have many procedures, and we need written instructions for all of them. --Teratornis (talk) 17:37, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

On "I think my company deserves an article on Wikipedia but none exists. What can I do?"

I think this section is not very clear: Where should they ask the article creation? We tell them to go on "an appropriate related talk page" but honestly I have no idea, despite being here for long, where I should look (WP:AFC tells us it is not for registered users). -- lucasbfr ^talk 18:49, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

Create the article in your user space. Make sure that the article cites at least two sources from mainstream or scholarly media. Then once it's ready, link to it in a related talk page. This could be the talk page of an article about the kinds of goods and services your company sells (e.g. cola for an article about PepsiCo) or the talk page of a WikiProject that maintains articles about the kinds of goods and services your company sells (e.g. WikiProject RPGs for an article about a publisher of tabletop role-playing games). Are there any subject areas on Wikipedia that still aren't covered by a WikiProject? --Damian Yerrick (talk | stalk) 20:17, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

It's much better, thanks! -- lucasbfr ^talk 08:18, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Corporate wikis

I believe WP:BFAQ needs a page to address questions like this which come up occasionally on the Help desk:

• WP:HD#Need advice: Private wiki or Wikipedia? - (archive link) - (permanent link)

Namely, some people look at Wikipedia and wonder if they can use Wikipedia itself to function like their own corporate wiki. Since WP:BFAQ does not yet address this question directly, I will add an entry that does. --Teratornis (talk) 18:42, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

I added the section: WP:BFAQ#CORPWIKI. --Teratornis (talk) 21:40, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks

Good to find this FAQ; I already knew about COI and WP:AUTO, this helps with various corporate-article duels out there. I don't suppose there's a Wikipedia:FAQ/Politicians or Wikipedia:FAQ/Politics is there? I'm thinking Enviropoliticians/activists as much as legislators/leaders/party hacks....Skookum1 (talk) 04:42, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

New section on page protection and official versions

I'm going to add a section saying something to the effect of "We will not prevent other people from editing your article". For whatever reason, I see a lot of businesses asking us if we can deny editing to everybody except their marketing people, and I'd love to head that question off as diplomatically as possible. - Jredmond (talk) 17:26, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Does this article apply to Government Employees?

• On the WP:COI talk page someone opined this FAQ applies to government employees. If it does, the FAQ should explicitly mention them.
• Also, given that most govt employees have the arm of the law behind them, I would say that employees editing from work or home on issues related to their job or employeers need a higher standard of disclosure and should do so only by declaring themselves govt employees, either in signature or in edit summary. (I personally would like to go further and see their allowed edits only be to put a tag on information citing the problem with it, leaving any deletion to non-government employees, including alleged defamation in Biographies.
• Of course, on the other hand, their outing themselves might intimidate others into following their edit suggestions and/or deleting material that shouldn't be deleted! So any government employee editing of material related to their jobs might be problematic. Any thoughts?
• I have not had a problem with people who appeared to be current govt employees, but lately have had quite a problem on a couple articles with people I suspect possibly might want jobs in, or currently work for, the incoming federal administration.Carol Moore 20:24, 13 November 2008 (UTC)Carolmooredc

If this FAQ applies to govt, then we need to review the remarks regarding citing your employer website. Federal government sites are regularly cited in Wikipedia as authoritative sources. It seems odd that a recognized authority couldn't be cited by some editors. Kos42 (talk) 00:15, 15 November 2008 (UTC)