Clients often picture disclosure as a kind of surrender: declare the conflict, then step back and hope a volunteer notices the page and fixes it. That is not how the mechanism works, and understanding its actual shape changes how we plan an engagement from the start.
Once a financial connection is on the record, the disclosed editor is asked not to touch the article directly. What replaces the edit is a request: a specific, sourced proposal posted on the article's talk page, describing exactly what should change and citing exactly where the claim comes from. An independent volunteer then reads it, checks the sourcing, and decides whether to implement it, in full, in part, or not at all.
You are strongly discouraged from editing affected articles directly.
The friction is the point, not a flaw in it. A stranger with nothing to gain is reading the sourcing cold, without the context that made it feel obviously correct to whoever drafted it. That is a better test than any internal review we could run ourselves.
We filed one such request this spring for a manufacturing client whose article still listed a chief executive who had left the company two years earlier. The correction was trivial, one sentence, backed by a corporate filing and a trade-press announcement. It still took nine days and two follow-up questions before a volunteer implemented it. We had also proposed adding a paragraph on a recent industry award; that part was declined, the volunteer judged the sourcing, a press release picked up by two trade outlets, too promotional to carry the claim on its own. Both outcomes were correct. That is what the process is for.
