charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Phil Sandifer wrote
Conflicts of interest seem the more sensible ones to rule out. Our rules against POV pushing already go against the worst problems of conflicts of interest, making the CoI rule something that mostly forbids good editing.
It's a guideline. I have constantly emphasised how good a piece of advice it is not to get into COI editing. People without WP experience really have no idea what a daily rund of edit war will do to them. We are not going to withdraw that advice. Let alone say paid PR people on the site are OK.
It seems to be brought up somewhat selectively, though. For example, many of our nationalistic disputes are more or less conflicts of interest: someone of nationality (or ancestry) X doing POV editing of an article related to country X. It is not at all surprising to find an edit war over an article with a title like [[X-Y conflict]] and find that the two sides are, respectively, of nationalities X and Y (or descended from them, or otherwise personally tied to them).
On the other hand, people living in or otherwise connected with a country are sometimes a valuable source for digging up cited information about the country, when not engaged in edit wars about it. So we don't generally make blanket rules like, "if you're from Sweden, you cannot edit Sweden-related articles." And so with COIs in general, IMO.
-Mark