No Advertising or Spam

Open Foresight Hub is not a means for promotion. Information about companies, individuals, products, and services must be written in an objective, unbiased style with verifiable third-party sources. The inappropriate addition of content to Open Foresight Hub with the intention of promoting or publicizing an outside organization, individual or idea, is spam and is considered harmful to the project. Do not disrupt Open Foresight Hub with spam. If you find spam, please remove or rewrite the content.

It can be tempting to write about yourself or projects in which you have a strong personal involvement. Writing about yourself is permissible in some cases. However, remember that the general notability guidelines apply to such pages just like any other. This includes the requirement to maintain a neutral point of view, which can be difficult when writing about yourself or about projects close to you. Articles written about yourself or the company you work for falls under self-promotion, and is subject to scrutiny for spam and advertising.

The best place to write about yourself is your user page. There, you can introduce yourself and provide links to help others find your work. Still, your user page is not advertising space. Keep it focused on you as an individual.

Posting spam is not always malicious or intentional. Some people spam without meaning to. A new editor who owns a business may see that there are articles about other businesses on Open Foresight Hub, and conclude that it would be appropriate to create their own such article. An author may see many places in Open Foresight where their paper would be relevant, and quickly add several dozen links to it. If you see spam, please remove or rewrite the content, but remember to assume good faith on the spammer's part.

These guidelines are intended to help editors avoid unintentionally posting spam- that is, how to mention a web site, product, business, or other resource without advertising it.

1. Review your intentions. Open Foresight Hub is not a space for personal promotion or the promotion of products, services, web sites, companies, or organizations. If you are here to tell readers how great something is, or to get exposure for a venture or product that nobody has heard of yet, you are in the wrong place.
2. Contribute cited text, not bare links. If you have a source to contribute, first contribute some facts that you learned from that source, then cite the source. Do not 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 are here to improve Open Foresight Hub—not just to funnel readers off Open Foresight Hub and onto some other site, right? (If not, see No. 1 above.)
3. The References section is for references. A reference directs the reader to a work that the writer(s) referred to while writing the article. The References section of an article is not just a list of related works; it is specifically the list of works used as sources. Therefore, it can never be correct to add a link or reference to References sections if nobody editing the text of the article has actually referred to it.
4. Do not make a new article for your own product or web site. Most often, when a person creates a new article describing their own work, it is because the work is not yet well-known enough to have attracted anyone else's attention, much less independent and reliable sources against which the content can be verified. Articles of this sort are usually deleted.
5. If your work is truly relevant to an article, others will agree—try the editor notes. 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 editor notes, asking other editors if it is relevant.

Categories: policy | code of conduct