Conflict-of-interest (COI) editing on Wikipedia occurs when editors use Wikipedia to advance the interests of their external roles or relationships. The type of COI editing that compromises Wikipedia the most is paid editing for public relations (PR) purposes.[1] Several policies and guidelines[a] exist to combat conflict of interest editing, including Wikipedia's conflict of interest guideline[b] and the Wikimedia Foundation's paid-contribution disclosure policy.[c]
Controversies reported by the media include United States congressional staff editing articles about members of Congress in 2006; Microsoft offering a software engineer money to edit articles on competing code standards in 2007; the PR firm Bell Pottinger editing articles about its clients in 2011; and the discovery in 2012 that British MPs or their staff had removed criticism from articles about those MPs. The media has also written about COI editing by BP, the Central Intelligence Agency, Diebold, Portland Communications, Sony, the Vatican, and several others.
In 2012, Wikipedia launched one of its largest sockpuppet investigations,[2] when editors reported suspicious activity suggesting 250 accounts had been used to engage in paid editing. Wikipedia traced the edits to a firm known as Wiki-PR and the accounts were banned. 2015's Operation Orangemoody uncovered another paid-editing scam, in which 381 accounts were used to extort money from businesses to create and ostensibly protect promotional articles about them.
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