05 — Submission Strategy & COI Compliance

Date: 2026-05-07 Audience: Bob, as the human submitter who carries the conflict-of-interest declaration. Annette's name does not appear anywhere in any Wikipedia-facing artifact.

Why this matters more than the writing

Two prior attempts to land Bruce Fisher (psychologist) on Wikipedia have failed. The talk-page record on User talk:Wikinowsam shows that the killing factor was not the topic — it was a combination of:

1. Undisclosed paid/COI editing
2. AI-generated text with telltale formatting and bad citations
3. Notability not anchored in independent secondary sources

If Bob's submission carries any of those three signals, it will be deleted on sight, and a third decline will make the fourth attempt even harder because the topic now has a decline-precedent footprint that AfC reviewers can see in the page-history logs.

So the submission strategy is: disclose hard, write by hand, anchor in academic sources.

Step 1 — Bob's user-page COI disclosure

Before any edit, Bob creates User:[Bob's chosen username] and posts the following text. This is non-negotiable per WP:COI and WP:PAID.

Recommended user-page wikitext:

== About this account ==

I am editing Wikipedia in connection with the Rebuilding-Seminars
divorce-recovery program, which is the modern continuation of the curriculum
originally developed by the late psychologist Bruce Fisher (1931–1998).

I have a conflict of interest with respect to the following Wikipedia topics:

* [[Bruce Fisher (psychologist)]] (proposed)
* [[Fisher Divorce Adjustment Scale]] (proposed)
* Sections of [[Divorce]] and related articles concerning Fisher's rebuilding model

Per [[Wikipedia:Conflict of interest]] and [[Wikipedia:Paid-contribution disclosure]],
I disclose that:

* I am an instructor in / facilitator of / [Bob picks the accurate phrasing]
  the Rebuilding-Seminars facilitator-training program.
* I am not paid by the Fisher estate, by New Harbinger Publications,
  or by any third party for my Wikipedia edits.
* I will refrain from editing the affected articles directly in mainspace
  and will instead propose changes on the relevant Talk pages using
  {{tl|request edit}} and {{tl|connected contributor (paid)}}.

I welcome independent editor review of any text I propose.

{{User COI}}

Bob should choose the accurate self-description. If Bob teaches the Rebuilding facilitator-training course commercially, write "facilitator and instructor in the commercial Rebuilding-Seminars program." If Bob runs the company, write "founder/operator." The disclosure is meaningless if it understates the relationship — Wikipedia editors are trained to spot soft disclosures, and the prior account got caught precisely because the relationship was downplayed as "content from the client."

Step 2 — Connected-contributor templates on each article's Talk page

Once articles exist (or once submitting a draft for one), Bob also adds:

{{Connected contributor (paid)
| User1 = [Bob's username] | U1-employer = [if applicable] | U1-client = [Rebuilding-Seminars LLC or whatever the legal entity is] | U1-EH = no | U1-otherlinks = [link to Bob's user page]
}}

This template appears at the top of the article's Talk page (not in the article itself). It tells future editors: a COI editor is involved here, treat all proposed edits with extra scrutiny.

Step 3 — How to actually submit (operational)

For the FDAS article (file 04):

1. Bob logs into Wikipedia. If new, account must be autoconfirmed (4 days old + 10 edits) before AfC will accept submissions. If Bob's account is brand-new, spend the first week making small uncontroversial edits to existing articles — a typo fix, a category addition, a citation format improvement.
2. Navigate to Wikipedia:Articles for creation. Click the green "Click here to start a new article" button. This opens the AfC wizard.
3. In the wizard, paste the FDAS wikitext from file 04. Fill in the article title: Fisher Divorce Adjustment Scale.
4. Before submitting, the wizard asks about COI. Disclose it. "I have a conflict of interest with this topic — see my user page."
5. Submit. The draft is now in queue. Expected wait: 8-16 weeks (AfC backlog as of 2026 runs 2-4 months).

For the Bruce Fisher (psychologist) article (file 03):

Same process. Submit AFTER the FDAS article is accepted, so the biographical draft can wikilink to an existing FDAS article (which strengthens the biographical article's notability case via the wiki-internal source graph).

For Edits 2 and 3 (existing articles):

1. Go to Talk:Divorce (and Talk:Psychological testing or whichever target Bob picks for Edit 3).
2. Open a new section: == Edit request: add reference to Fisher rebuilding model ==
3. Use {{request edit}} template at top.
4. Paste proposed wikitext + sources.
5. Wait for an independent editor to action it. Typical response time: 1-3 weeks if the request is clean and well-sourced.

Step 4 — What if it gets declined again?

If declined for "notability not established":

• Read the reviewer's comment carefully. They may be saying the biographical notability isn't there even if the FDAS notability is. That's a reason to lead with the FDAS article (file 04) and only attempt the biography after the FDAS article is live.
• Do NOT immediately resubmit. Address the specific concerns first.

If declined for "promotional tone":

• Find every adjective in the draft that could be cut. Cut them. Resubmit.

If declined for "AI-generated content":

• This is the same trap that killed the prior submission. Re-write every sentence in Bob's own voice, longhand. Vary sentence lengths. Cut all bullet lists that aren't structurally necessary. Resubmit.

If declined three times: stop. Step back. Consider hiring a Wikipedia-experienced editor for review only (not for editing) — see the "DO NOT" list below for important caveats.

What NOT to do (recap)

• ❌ Do not hire a "Wikipedia services" / "Wikipedia ranking" / "guaranteed-publish" agency. These are nearly all violating WP:PAID and WP:SOCK. Wikipedia routinely identifies and blocks them; their work product gets reverted; clients' COI is exposed in the public log. The 2026 Bureau of Investigative Journalism report on Portland Communications is the recent high-profile example.
• ❌ Do not create multiple accounts. Sock-puppetry is a global ban offense.
• ❌ Do not edit the article in mainspace once it's accepted. Even after acceptance, Bob continues to use Talk-page {{request edit}} for changes. This is a lifetime constraint for COI editors on this topic.
• ❌ Do not paste any draft from this folder into Wikipedia "as-is" without re-reading it line by line. I (Charlie) wrote this in 2026 and Wikipedia conventions can drift; verify the current {{request edit}} template name, the current AfC submission template, and current category names at submission time.
• ❌ Do not link rebuildingseminars.com from the article body. External-links section is the only acceptable place, and only if reviewers don't object.

What is acceptable assistance to commission

• ✅ Independent editor review of Bob's draft, before submission, by a Wikipedia editor with no financial relationship to Rebuilding-Seminars. They can flag tone problems, missing citations, bad source choices. They do not edit on Bob's behalf and do not submit on Bob's behalf.
• ✅ Bibliographic research help to locate a real Daily Camera (Boulder) obituary for Fisher in newspapers.com archives. A 1998 mainstream-press obituary, if it exists, would be a meaningful biographical citation.
• ✅ Subject-matter peer review by a divorce-research academic who can confirm the FDAS validation citations are correctly characterized.

Realistic timeline for ALL three edits to land

Realistic full-stack timeline: 5-7 months. Pessimistic: 9-10 months.

This is much longer than the original brief implied. The honest read is that Wikipedia is a slow-compounding LLM-SEO asset, not a fast one — but once it lands, every LLM with a 2026+ training cutoff inherits the citation indefinitely. That's the trade.

What this strategy explicitly does NOT promise

• Acceptance is not guaranteed. AfC reviewers have wide discretion. The Bruce Fisher biography case is genuinely on the edge of notability — a reviewer could decline a clean draft for legitimate reasons, and there's no appeal process beyond resubmission.
• Once accepted, the article belongs to Wikipedia. Future editors can rewrite it, propose deletion, merge it into another article, or restructure it. Bob has no control over this and shouldn't try to assert any.
• LLMs cite Wikipedia heterogeneously. ChatGPT and Claude cite it heavily; Perplexity sometimes; Gemini intermittently. The compounding-citation effect is real but not uniform.

The play is still worth running. Just with eyes open about cost and timeline.