[WikiEN-l] Bad And Wrong Policy/Procedure/Guideline

Sat Nov 4 22:34:55 UTC 2006

Ray Saintonge wrote

> charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com wrote:
> 
> >Ray Saintonge wrote
> >  
> >
> >>Why is it so necessary to have everything spelled out in such detail?  
> >>You are making "conflict of interest" an issue that is out of all 
> >>proportion to its importance.  

> >Hmmm. I remember some very long threads of discussion here, quite recently, about corporate interests. Are you just assuming those will go away? 

> There was indeed the long thread that you mention.  I am not a supporter 
> of the corporatist agenda, but the best way to keep an eye on it is to 
> have it right out there in the open.  Let them have their paragraph 
> (sometimes more depending on the topic), and there will still be room 
> for rebuttals or criticisms of their agenda.  The real neutrality will 
> often be somewhere in between.  If they parrot the company's PR line it 
> will be evident that it is exactly that.

But there is and was more to it. One of my 'tedious' additions to the guideline was to make it plain that 'declaring an interest' is not a quid pro quo, in the sense that it gives no 'locus standi' (to adopt the lawyers' term). The point is still there, in a muffled form.

That is, you might have thought, coming from outside, that if you declare your interest, you can then behave as a 'proponent', a 'defender', an 'advocate', whatever you might wish to call it. Basically people from outside WP who want to be hired guns may well think that it would be OK, provided thay are open about it.

Well, it ain't OK. Declaring an interest, saying you work for IBM and will be looking after articles for them, is not OK. Imagine this from the other side: does IBM hire one clerical assistant for this, an office of three or four? It's a money thing for them, isn't it? But if it gets professionalised like that, there will be essentially no chance that someone who edits WP of an evening will be able to track all the editorial activity. 

We might be flattering ourselves right now, to think that it matters so much to corporations. Come 2010, we absolutely do not want to be told that we have flacks like termites in the foundations. 

WP has experienced exponential growth (I'm a mathematician, I don't the term lightly). This is a rare thing, in the real world. Because things do _not_ scale; the scaling issues cannot be ignored with impunity. The hubbub caused by Danny a little while is a symptom. The relationship WP-corporate world is precisely the sort of thing that can exhibit a tipping point. 

Charles

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