[WikiEN-l] WP:COI violation

Sat Nov 11 20:20:57 UTC 2006

On 11/11/06, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:
> 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.
>
Maybe a rule/guideline/policy against ranting about how evil Wikipedia
is, against making personal attacks, against making legal threats,
against using sockpuppets to "vote"?

Is there a rule against ranting about how evil Wikipedia is?

Anthony