Charles Matthews wrote:
Nathan wrote:
On the contrary, my guess is quite a few articles about individuals and companies of mid-level fame were created by fans, friends, associates, employees, etc. Perhaps a deep review with WikiScanner will allow us to identify some of these suspect articles, and delete them because they were created with impure motives.
As far as I know, motivation is still a bad argument at AfD. The basic "conflict of interest" point is not that motives should be pure, whatever that means, but that outside motivation should not be playing a role so large that the interests of the encyclopedia are pushed to one side.
"Impure motives" suggests that somebody knows why the contributor added something better than he does himself. A true conflict of interest is rarely so obvious, and rarely so large as to damage the interests of the encyclopedia. Reasonable people will adapt to circumstances when it is pointed out that they are in a "potential" conflict of interest that was never made obvious to them.
Ec