Hi Alexandre,
Thanks for reminding me that placing a COI disclosure in an edit summary is
okay. I forgot that policy allows that. I would have recommended that your
op-ed say something like "Some advice for Olivia Colman: she can edit
Wikipedia herself (and provide conflict of interest notifications and links
to reliable sources where appropriate), or request an edit by noting the
issue on the article's talk page, or send an email to Wikipedia's volunteer
response team to request a correction."
In the case of someone who wants to use a potentially nonpublic document
like a birth certificate as their reliable source, I think that sending an
email to OTRS would be a good option, because the requester can email a
copy of the birth certificate to OTRS without needing to make the
certificate be public. Alternatively, if a birth certificate is an easily
accessible public record of a government that issued it, or someone wants
to use other public documents to support their claim, then I think that
placing an edit request on the talk page or directly editing the article
while including a COI notification and a reference would be good options.
I think that reminding people that they can edit the encyclopedia, and post
comments on the talk page, are both generally good. But I also want to
discourage COI editing of article content, especially when it is
undisclosed, and I would not want to discourage people from emailing OTRS.
Regards,
Pine
(
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
On Fri, Feb 15, 2019 at 10:08 PM Alexandre Hocquet <
alexandre.hocquet(a)univ-lorraine.fr> wrote:
On 15/02/2019 19:37, Pine W wrote:
When I read your article I am concerned about
this statement: "Some
advice
for Olivia Colman: rather than “sending an e-mail
to Wikipedia”, she can
edit Wikipedia herself, like everyone else". That comes across to me as
encouraging violation of English Wikipedia's Conflict of Interest
guideline
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest>. Can you
explain why you encouraged directly editing Wikipedia instead of placing
an
edit request on the talk page or sending an email
to OTRS?
Hey Pine,
Thanks for your comment and careful reading. My piece of advice for
Olivia is suposed to be rhetorical : I doubt she would have to modifiy
herself her own page, as it's been proven that her birthdate was plain
right all along the page history. My point was more to highlight the
fact that a large number of people believe that a supposedly uncorrect
fact on Wikipedia cannot be modified easily and one has to "send an
email". And that journalists that publish this nonsense aren't aware
either of the "anyone can edit" part of Wikipedia (in 2019!).
Now, if a conflict of interest policy prevents you to provide a reliable
secondary source about a factual point such as your own birthdate and
edit Wikipedia accordingly, I find it would be a harsh conflict of
interest policy. As a matter of fact WP : COI does not prevent to
directly edit oneself : it suggests (along with your recommandations) to
disclaim it in the edit summary. (And the "dealing with articles about
yourself" link provided by Avery (thanks for that) is also open to that
possibility. I would even find it harsh to argue that such an edit would
"undermine the interests of the encyclopedia".
--
***********************************************
Alexandre Hocquet
Université de Lorraine & Archives Henri Poincaré
Alexandre.Hocquet(a)univ-lorraine.fr
http://poincare.univ-lorraine.fr/fr/membre-titulaire/alexandre-hocquet
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