On 10 July 2014 17:17, Jennifer Gristock <gristock@me.com> wrote:

This [in my view, peculiar] perspective, that citing yourself is a COI, is a million miles away from Pau's [in my view, sensible] advice that

First, COI is related to editing Wikipedia in your own interests or in the interests of your external relationships. It does not forbid obviously writing about the things you're an expert on. If you are able to separate these two things, you're allowed to do it.

I would be much obliged if those who agree with Pau could  +1 his email (or this one) so that I can be sure that the whole system I am attempting to design, - which involves academics and their students contributing information from their own research and citing it - does not by definition forbidden because of COI.


No, citing yourself is not necessarily COI. One reason is that Wikipedia distinguishes between "apparent" or "potential conflict of interest", which is relatively easy to comprehend (we are all familiar with the finger-pointing involved), and "conflict of interest" in the Wikipedia sense, which means that potential conflict of interest has somehow infected your editing. 

I happen to have met this recently in relation to work I did over 30 years ago. And I was reluctant to cite a joint paper for mine, just because I have also a long (but not quite so long) history with the COI guideline and the way it got drafted. The guideline is not intended to prevent academic experts contributing to Wikipedia in their area of expertise: that would be self-defeating, daft, and anyone can draft that guideline (i.e. conflate potential conflict of interest with what is under discussion). 

To try to put it more clearly: Wikipedia has content policies (and topic policies, not usually called that). If your potential conflict of interest means you infringe on the spirit of those, you're in trouble. I do mean the spirit: citing the letter of the law in something like NPOV is not useful here, because policy is not drafted like a legal document.

So, in reverse order:

3. Wikipedia has policies and guidelines, but they are not drafted by lawyers for lawyers
2. They are drafted to explain the reasonable expectations applying to those who edit the site.
1. In relation to COI and content policy, we hit the kind of area where people are least likely to respect the spirit, and it matters the most that they do.

I would say to get 1 right, any system does have to educate those invited to join it on the implications. 

Charles