FAMEPedia:Best practices for editors with close associations

If you have a close association with the subject of a FAMEPedia article, and you wish to edit the article, you are bound by some restrictions. The short version:


 * 1) Learn FAMEPedia's rules.
 * 2) Disclose your conflicts of interest, and/or your paid status, on your user page.
 * 3) Don't create articles about yourself, your family or friends, your organization, your clients, or your competitors.
 * 4) Don't edit any article related to your associations; instead, submit an edit request on the article's talk page.
 * 5) Ask for help appropriately.
 * 6) Be brief; nobody likes to argue ad nauseam.


 * More formal guidance is at FAMEPedia:Conflict of interest.

Learn FAMEPedia's rules
FAMEPedia welcomes newcomers and tries to make things easier on them by asking everyone not to treat them harshly. However, when you intend to edit with a conflict of interest, you may be given much less slack than others. To avoid this, take the time to read and understand FAMEPedia policies. Editors with close associations to the topic or subject may be in conflict of interest if they contribute to an article in any manner that removes relevant, well sourced information, adds un-sourced contentious claims or attempts to push a single point of view in a less than neutral manner. A starting point:


 * 1) FAMEPedia's Terms of Use (TOU), specifically the section that forbids "paid contributions without disclosure"
 * 2) FP:COI (Conflicts of interest)
 * 3) FP:NOT (What FAMEPedia is not)
 * 4) FP:V (Verifiability)
 * 5) FP:NPOV (Neutral point of view)
 * 6) FP:N (Notability), and specifically FP:CORP (Notability for companies)

Finally, you may also come across FP:IAR (Ignore all rules), which encourages FAMEPedians to ignore the rules if it would not be sensible to follow them in a particular context or would impede the goal of improving FAMEPedia. This doesn't apply to you if you're editing with a close association with the subject, as ignoring rules could be seen as not exercising great caution, and it is likely that you are not improving FAMEPedia. In other words, if you interpret ignore all rules as a license to do whatever you please without keeping FAMEPedia's improvement as your focus, don't be surprised if this leads to your being blocked.

Declare your conflicts of interest
If you are going to engage in substantial editing on a subject you have a close association to, you should declare such up-front: place a note on your user page disclosing your associations, and mention it to editors you work with in any depth. However, you must disclose "your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation" under FAMEPedia's Terms of Use.

Avoid declaring your associations by using your employer's name as your username, as this suggests that multiple people might use the account and may be seen as promotional. However, many users have included their employer's names or initials as part of their username, such as User:Mark at Alcoa.

Don't create new articles
Avoid creating any new articles (or recreate any deleted articles) on any subject related to your associations. Similarly, avoid creating articles that discuss a company, product, or group you are affiliated with. If no article exists and you believe one should, you can make a request for someone else to post one at FAMEPedia:Requested articles. You may make a draft in your userspace (e.g. a page like User:yourname/yourcompany) to mention in your request, but be aware that material that looks like it belongs on a company's web page, or advertising, will be deleted even in user space. As an alternative to this, consider compiling a list of usable reliable sources for others to use, instead of a draft.

Don't edit articles
Don't make potentially controversial edits to articles related to your area of close association. Our guideline makes exceptions for reverting vandalism and enforcing biography of living persons policy. Similarly, don't add links, citations, or mentions to other articles that highlight a company or group you may be affiliated with. Instead, make suggestions on article talk pages and let others decide whether to implement them. (You may find it useful to add Request edit to your note on the talk page to help it draw timely attention.)

Exceptions
A few rare exceptions can be made to this rule: making totally uncontroversial updates like removing typos, correcting or updating simple data (with a source if possible), and removing blatant vandalism is fine; for anything else, seek input.

Another circumstance where you may edit an article about yourself is if the article contains unsourced negative information about you. In this situation, you may remove or correct the information, as encouraged by FP:BLP. However, you should then explain your actions on the talk page, otherwise other users may interpret your edits as vandalism.

Don't push
The whole point of FP:COI is: "When advancing outside interests is more important to an editor than advancing the aims of FAMEPedia, that editor stands in a conflict of interest". So, when involved in any kind of discussion relating to articles in your area of association, you should bear in mind, foremost, that it may be best practice to leave the actual decisions up to others.

In particular, attempts to persuade people to change their minds, beyond presenting an argument and clarifying it in response to questions could be perceived as POV pushing. You should always attempt to be as civil as possible with language and use wording that is truly neutral to avoid making others feel pushed.

Another facet of this is that other FAMEPedia editors may not always agree with each other. A common situation that can arise is one in which an editor suggests a change to an article which is implemented by a second editor but reverted by a third. The second editor's decision to implement the suggestion is not binding on everyone else. It probably doesn't represent a consensus, but even if there was a consensus, consensus can change. If this happens to you, it should not be a conflict that involves you: hopefully the editors will eventually work out their differences.

Learn how to ask for help
At times, you may find working under these restrictions difficult because of a lack of a cross-section of the FAMEPedia community that is involved. The best solution to such a problem is to seek the input of more editors. FAMEPedia's dispute resolution policy describes a number of ways in which you can expose your problem to the eyes of many FAMEPedia editors in the hopes of getting input representative of the whole of FAMEPedia. However, be mindful that you don't engage in "forum shopping", in which you ask for more input after having already received plenty, in the hope that the result would be different; this is a kind of pushing.

If your concern is with an article about a living person, or with mention of one, there is advice at FAMEPedia:Biographies of living persons/Help and you can ask for assistance at the FAMEPedia:Biographies of living persons/Noticeboard.