Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia

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.

, a guideline, "strongly discourages" COI editing, and advises those with a financial conflict of interest, including paid editors, to refrain from direct article editing. , a policy, requires that editors disclose their "employer, client, and affiliation" with respect to any contribution for which they are paid, including talk-page contributions.

The Federal Trade Commission has published a guide to its regulations to implement federal law concerning the use of endorsements and testimonials in advertising at Endorsement Guidelines and Dot Com Disclosures.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in the UK reached a similar decision in June 2012 in relation to material about Nike on Twitter. The ASA found that the content of certain tweets from two footballers had been "agreed with the help of a member of the Nike marketing team." The tweets were not clearly identified as Nike marketing communications, and were therefore in breach of the ASA's code.

Later, in 2011, conflicted edits were also made to US Congressional representative David Rivera's article.

Although the edits correlated with known IP addresses, there was no proof that the changes actually came from a member of the organization or employee of the company, only that someone had access to their network.

During the 2008 U.S. presidential election, changes made by both Barack Obama and John McCain's campaigns made the news. A user who later claimed to work for the McCain campaign made changes to Sarah Palin's article just before the announcement that she would run for the vice-presidency.

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