User:Thinktangtoe

Conflict of Interest Statement:

In accordance with the Wikimedia Foundation’s terms of use, I hereby disclose my status as a paid contributor hired by the Potomac Officers Club. I was tapped to provide – to the extent allowed by the circumstance – independent documentation of the company’s history, leadership, hosted events and guest speakers.

My job is not to frame the company in a positive light but to compile already-existing, verifiable information from a range of open sources, including POC’s events page. I acknowledge that even a perfectly neutral article will inadvertently benefit POC through exposure, and neither the company nor I deny that part of my submission’s purpose is to achieve that. Nevertheless, I hold that my successful publication would serve to educate and benefit the wider government contracting community.

I have read Wikipedia’s policies and understand that it is an encyclopedia and not a marketing tool. Therefore, I wrote my articles as references; not as a business directory or index. Part of my intent is to extend POC’s coverage of the government contracting space to Wikipedia’s massive userbase, helping educate users inside and outside the sector.

POC frequently works with prominent companies and government officials, many of whom already have their own Wikipedia pages. The pieces of information about the officials and executives that I used were taken from publicly available sources and are already present on Wikipedia. As such, I do not intend to propose changes to existing articles.

In covering POC’s history and background, I took extra care to avoid any value judgment and to only include basic information typically found in any company’s profile. All information and statements that might be construed as promotion were appropriately attributed to or quoted from the company itself. For example, I made it clear that the information about the company’s mission was taken directly from its leadership’s statement.

My submission regarding the company’s events was similarly written and does not include any judgment on their success or lack thereof. It only mentions the events’ purposes and other noncontroversial facts such as the dates they were held and their attending speakers. In addition, many of POC’s events were covered by independent media outlets interested in the government contracting sector.