Wikipedia:Advocacy

This is an explanatory essay about the What Wikipedia is not and Neutral point of view pages.

This page provides additional information about concepts in the page(s) it supplements. This page is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community.

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This page in a nutshell: Wikipedia is not a venue for raising the visibility of an issue or agenda. Cooperate with other editors to neutrally summarize notable topics using reliable sources without advocating any particular position or giving undue weight to minority views.

Advocacy is the use of Wikipedia to promote a person's or organization's beliefs or agendas at the expense of Wikipedia's goals and core content policies, including verifiability and neutral point of view. Despite the popularity of Wikipedia, it is not a soapbox to use for editors' activism, recruitment, promotion, advertising, announcements, or other forms of advocacy.

Wikipedia is first and foremost an encyclopedia which aims to create a breadth of high-quality, neutral, verifiable articles and to become a serious, respected reference work. Some editors come to Wikipedia with the goal of raising the visibility or credibility of a specific topic, term or viewpoint leading to disproportionate coverage, false balance and reference spamming. When advocates of specific views prioritize their agendas over the project's goals or factions with different agendas battle to install their favored content, edit-warring and other disruptions ensue. Wikipedia operates through collaboration between editors to achieve the encyclopedia's goals. Differences of opinion about neutrality, reliability, notability, and other issues are properly resolved through civil discussion aimed at facilitating a consensus.

Advocacy is closely related to conflict of interest, but differs in that advocacy is a general term for promotional and agenda-based editing, while conflict of interest primarily describes promotional editing by those with a close personal or financial connection to the subject.