Open the Conflict of Interest noticeboard on any weekday and a dozen or more threads sit active, each built on one question: does this account have an undisclosed tie to the page it edits? The board is public, archived, and indexed by search engines — a thread opened in March is still one search away in November.
A report usually starts the same way. A volunteer scanning recent changes, or sometimes a rival, notices a pattern: an account that only ever improves one company's page, three new accounts editing the same paragraph within a week, a history section that reads like a press release with the byline removed. They post the diffs, name the account, and ask the question in public. A different volunteer, with no stake in the outcome, then checks three things: the edit history, whether a disclosure exists anywhere in the account's user page or talk contributions, and whether the content itself holds up against independent sourcing.
What happens next depends almost entirely on that second check. An account that disclosed on day one gets a short thread: a volunteer confirms the disclosure, skims the edits for accuracy, and closes the case within a day or two, sometimes with a note thanking the account for being upfront. An account with nothing on record gets the long version — editors dig through months of contributions, compare writing style against known agencies, and debate a block or a mandatory disclosure template while the subject's biography sits tagged at the top for anyone passing through to read.
Editors must disclose who is paying them, who the client is, and any other relevant affiliation, on their user page, the talk page, or in edit summaries.
Disclosure itself changes almost nothing about what an account is allowed to write. The same sourcing rules apply, and so does the same expectation that a connected editor proposes changes on the talk page rather than making them directly. What changes is who has to do the explaining, and when. Disclosed upfront, the explaining happens once, in a sentence, before anyone asks. Undisclosed, it happens in public, over days, after someone has already decided the account looks suspicious.
We file every disclosure before the first edit goes live — not because the noticeboard would eventually catch us, though it likely would, but because a thread that opens with a confirmation closes faster than one that opens with a question.
