[WikiEN-l] WP:COI violation

Sat Nov 11 16:18:22 UTC 2006

On 10 Nov 2006 at 20:30, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

> Asking someone to "avoid" participating does not imply disallowing that 
> participation.  It only warns them that this sometimes leads to 
> conflicts.  If Angela participates in a discussion about deleting an 
> article about her why should anyone object.  Her wiki work has made her 
> notable, but the final decision on this is not hers.  I have no reason 
> to believe that her comments will be other than within the bounds of 
> acceptable editing.  What would be a conflict of interest would be for 
> her to exercise her influence with the highest levels of WMF as the 
> basis for either including or excluding an article about her.

It seems to all depend on just how the affected party goes about such 
participation.  If they simply write a polite, courteous, concise 
piece contributing an explanation of why, from their openly noted 
perspective of involvement in the article's subject, they believe the 
article should be [kept | deleted | etc.], then there's no reason to 
object, especially if the conflict-of-interest is noted and 
acknowledged and the comments are not formatted in the style of a 
"vote", but rather as information to contribute to the discussion.

On the other hand, if somebody comes into such discussions with a 
chip on their shoulder, makes long rants about how evil Wikipedia and 
Wikipedians are because they don't all automatically take the "right" 
side on the issue, makes personal attacks and legal threats, brings 
in sockpuppets and meatpuppets to "vote" along with them, and replies 
to any criticism with further rants which lead to flame wars and 
pissing contests that make the AfD page in question a mile long and 
with an extremely low signal-to-noise ratio, then they are not making 
a very constructive contribution.

I'm not sure what sort of rule, guideline, or policy could be made 
that encourages the former while discouraging the latter.

-- 
== Dan ==
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