PrintWiki/No Self Promotion

There are many companies and individuals related to the printing industries. These companies and individuals are not allowed to use PrintWiki to advertise their goods and services. Articles about companies and individuals should be more along the lines of a biography and should respect their competitors.

You are free to write about yourself or projects you have a strong personal involvement in. However, remember that the articles must meet the requirement to maintain a neutral point of view, which is difficult when writing about yourself or your product. Creating overly abundant links and references to autobiographical articles is unacceptable.

Articles about companies and products are acceptable if they are written in an objective and unbiased style. All article topics must be third-party verifiable. External links to commercial organizations are acceptable if they can serve to identify major corporations associated with a topic. Please note PrintWiki does not endorse any businesses and it does not set up affiliate programs.

Articles considered advertisements include those that are solicitations for a business, product or service, or are public relations pieces designed to promote a company or individual. Spam articles are usually noted for sales-oriented language and external links to a commercial website. However, a differentiation should be made between spam articles and legitimate articles about commercial entities.

Some people spam Wikipedia without meaning to. That is, they do things which are considered to be spam, without realizing that their actions are not in line with building an encyclopedia. A new editor who owns a business may see that there are articles about other businesses on PrintWiki, and conclude that it would be appropriate to create his own such article. A Web site operator may see many places in PrintWiki where his or her site would be relevant, and quickly add several dozen links to it.

Another form of self-promotion is adding inappropriate external links for advertisement and/or self-promotion. This applie to placing links on numerous and/or unrelated pages. Adding self-promotional links to a few related articles may be inappropriate, but is not vandalism.

When self promotional vandalism is spotted the offending articles will either be trimmed or removed. Contributors posting such articles will be banned from future posting. See the PrintWiki Vandalism Policy for details

• Review your intentions. PrintWiki is not a space for personal promotion or the promotion of products, services, Web sites, fandoms, ideologies, or other memes. If you're here to tell readers how great something is, or to get exposure for an idea or product that nobody's heard of yet, you're in the wrong place. Likewise, if you're here to make sure that the famous PrintWiki cites you as the authority on something (and possibly pull up your sagging PageRank) you'll probably be disappointed.
  

• Contribute cited text, not bare links. PrintWiki is an encyclopedia, not a link farm. If you have a source to contribute, first contribute some facts that you learned from that source, then cite the source. Don't simply direct readers to another site for the useful facts; add useful facts to the article, then cite the site where you found them. You're here to improve PrintWiki — not just to funnel readers onto some other site. (If not, see #1 above.)
  

• Don't make a new article for your own product or Web site. Most often, when a person creates a new article describing his or her own work, it's because the work is not yet well-known enough to have attracted anyone else's attention, much less verifiable sources. Articles of this sort are usually deleted. PrintWiki does indeed have articles about popular products and Web sites, but it is not acceptable to use PrintWiki to popularize them.
  

• Don't gratuitously set off our spam radar. There are certain stylistic behaviors that will say "spam!" loud and clear to anyone who's watching:
  

• Adding a link to the top of an unordered list. This is an A-number-1, red-flag, hot-button spam sign. It suggests that you want people to look at your link FIRST FIRST FIRST! You wouldn't butt in at the head of a queue; don't put your link first.
  

• Adding a link that's snazzier than any of the others. If there's a list of products that gives just their names, and you add a product with a short blurb about how great it is, we'll all know why you did it. The same applies to adding a list item that is in a larger or otherwise more prominent font than the other items.
  

• Adding many links to (or mentions of) the same site or product. Going through an article and adding the name of your product to every paragraph where it seems relevant is just going to attract the revert button.
  

• Adding the same link to many articles. The first person who notices you doing this will go through all your recent contributions with an itchy trigger finger on the revert button. And that's not much fun.
  

• If your product is truly relevant to an article, others will agree — try the talk page. We usually recommend that editors be bold in adding directly to articles. But if the above advice makes you concerned that others will regard your contribution as spam, you can find out without taking that risk: Describe your work on the article's talk page, asking other editors if it is relevant.