PR firms LOVE Wikipedia...
If you had the perfect definition for "conflict of interest", you could have well edited the article and added your definition. Its always better to light the lamp than blame darkness.
Instead, what's happened is this: WP is entirely built out of volunteer contributions, volunteers are often interested in specific topics close to their daily lives, and contributions from subject matter experts --- that is, the best contributions --- tend to be freighted with COI issues. So resolving how the project is meant to handle COI without shutting off their best contributions is difficult and can involve lots of rules-lawyering.
Again, these kinds of arguments always seem to take for granted that we are talking about perhaps one of the most successful group projects in the history of the Internet; Wikipedia is, of course, an achievement on par with many of the best of the last 20 years. But now that we have it, and the novelty is all gone, all we can do to engage with what WP is doing is snark at it.
It's not WP:COI. It's a different page, a Wikipedia RfC that they held for some reason or another; they were theorizing for quite some time why it doesn't matter if a contributor holds a conflict of interest, Wikipedia will correct itself over the long term, and only eventually someone came up and defined what a conflict of interest actually is. I still cannot find the page but wish I could show you.
[edit] It's this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/...
Jesus Christ, twenty years ago the medical press learned about conflicts of interest at the hand of the tobacco industry, and still a substantial part of contributors believes it's unimportant or will correct itself eventually.
Only a few months back, a BP representative declared their involvement with BP and proceeded to edit the page on BP unimpeded. Companies send press kits to trade journals, but they never got to actually write material, unless labeled "advertisement".
The way Wikipedia deals with PR is simply hideous. OK, they are waking up, but the fact of them ignoring centuries of real-world experience with the subject thinking they could do better just makes my head shake.
http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2013/03/wi...
That fact that it can happen here - and to this extent - should be very good reason to assume that similar efforts are being made by every global corporation with a communications budget to match its image problems (e.g. Goldman Sachs, Monsanto, etc.)
If you're truly interested in finding out more about particular companies, you can sort through the edit histories and correlating changes (where possible) with editors working for or with the companies in question.
If your standard is a project that simultaneously accepts anonymous contributions and credibly claims never to have PR-manipulated content on the site, that's unreasonable.
Here is an actual example how PR has been dealt with: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/....
The protagonists are "TimidGuy", a person affiliated with Maharishi University of Management engaging in advocacy for Transcendental Meditation, and "Will Beback", the fellow who attempted to put a lid on the PR. The outcome: a siteban for Will Beback and no consequences for TimidGuy.
A weak performance.
Another Wikipedia editor notices the resumption in editing and goes nuts, trying to out the user, appealing for the user to be banned, and picking intractable fights.
What conclusion was this case supposed to come to?
Is it your belief that the whole of ArbCom are secretly in the tank for commercial transcendental meditation?
Also, look at how much time Wikipedia sunk into trying to resolve this case carefully. How do you find a way to make that a bad thing?
I said this already: in the real world companies send press releases to trade journals, who then turn those into editorial content. The equivalent on Wikipedia would be that the PR professional makes his suggestions on the talkpage but is banned from the main article. It this even a question? What alternative do you suggest? Neither Harvard nor Maharishi University get to write their own pages in US News & World Report College Rankings Issue.
I can understand well how someone can go mad and eventually become completely out of order when faced with a history of ethically questionable behaviour. Unfortunately Wikipedia isn't very lenient with mad people.
> Is it your belief that the whole of ArbCom are secretly in the tank for commercial transcendental meditation?
They are just inexperienced and clueless. But that isn't an excuse, clue is required when in a visible position at one of the world's top websites.
Did you ever read the Conflict-of-Interest RfC? Actually it is a product of that TM Arbcom case. There are some real howlers in there:
Jclemens: Whether an editor is directly paid to edit Wikipedia is irrelevant to the quality of their contributions
Sandstein: Conflict of interest (COI) is a problem only where it leads to the production of non-neutral (or unverifiable, or otherwise policy-noncompliant) content
Sven Manguard: We should not treat paid editors differently from unpaid editors.
Elen of the Roads: ... to be clear that the problem is not working for Acme PR, being Prof Elk or having a lifelong interest in debunking astrology. It is breaching the contract with the reader that articles will be fair, balanced, neutral, give due weight to all the current thinking.
All of these are prominent Wikipedians with very, very muddled thinking.
I simply don't care what you read on some Wikipedia discussion page about what random people on the Internet think about conflict-of-interest edits. The project has rules; cite those, or cite instances where the rules weren't followed.