How do Wikipedia editors detect promotional content?

Wikipedia editors recognize promotional content quickly and consistently because the patterns are stable. Sourcing patterns are the next strongest signal: articles that lean heavily on press releases, the company’s own website, wire-service syndications, and primary sources rather than on independent secondary coverage are easy to identify and routinely flagged. Reviewer history matters: editors who track new articles look at the history of the submitting account, and a single-purpose account whose entire history is one company gets scrutinized harder. Policy enforcement at the article level (NPOV tags, citation needed, undue weight tags) is the visible output of this detection. The implications for COI work are direct: the way to avoid detection is to write content that does not look promotional, source it the way Wikipedia expects, and disclose properly, not to try to hide the relationship.