But there seems to be a significant misunderstanding about what I mean by areas where vested interests work tirelessly to advance agendas. I'm not talking about areas of real life strife and controversy, goodness; I wouldn't think of editing in such areas. Areas like Israel-Palestine, climate change, intelligent design, abortion --- I wouldn't go near those political minefields. But I think it's worth noting that those areas differ materially from the areas I'm talking about, in that in those political areas there are reliable sources on both sides and the question is how to negotiate neutrality between contradictory sources.
What I'm talking about is areas where the consensus of research literature is unequivocal and clear but where vested interests continually remove scientific literature reviews and replace them with blogs or promotional literature or other less reliable sources, in the interest of promoting unscientific or pseudoscientific claims, most often to serve a financial interest. It's like trying to bail out the ocean with a teacup to keep those articles neutral, and there's little help from anyone on the project; when one of these topic areas goes to ArbCom it's most often someone on the side of the encyclopedia rather than on the side of the vested interests that is banned for becoming frustrated and losing their temper. Occasionally an editor that is seen as too close in a COI way to the interest that's being served by the POV edits is banned, but as I've said before, there are always more where those came from.
OK, now I know what you're talking about - not in the sense that you're talking about any specific article or controversy, which I respect your decision not to name, but in the general sense you're talking about. At the anniversary celebrations in New York, after I gave my presentation (completely unrelated to this subject), someone mentioned this to me. He talked specifically about articles about certain drugs, where he felt that there were organized, possibly paid groups of editors, working hard to keep the articles consistent with the company line, and endlessly reverting anyone who even tried to add anything from a somewhat reputable journal that might suggest otherwise.
And the pseudoscience issue ... I know exactly what you mean; I've seen several editors who made it their business to keep those articles neutral and in accord with mainstream scientific consensus (often with little in the way of support from any other member of the community) succumb to the constant pressure and vitriol directed their way from off- and on-wiki, to the point of, as you noted, getting sanctioned by ArbCom. That phenomenon certainly existed online before Wikipedia, although it did acquire its own special volatility when "anyone could edit".
Daniel Case