On Sun, Jul 6, 2008 at 10:49 PM, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Ian Woollard wrote:
On 02/07/2008, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
Wikipedia has thousands of articles about towns written by people who live in them, languages by people who speak them and academic fields by people who work in them. I don't see any bright line between that, and writing about a company you work for, in terms of notability.
The bright line is money. My town doesn't pay me. My language doesn't pay me. My company does pay me. That's not conducive to truth or accuracy or referencing reliable sources.
So should I cease writing on my academic specialty? It is directly in my monetary and professional interest if my area (which is fairly small) gets more publicity, and Wikipedia can probably help with that. However, it *also* happens to be the area I'm most professionally qualified to edit in (being vaguely close to receiving a PhD in it), and I also have a genuine desire (apart from self-interest) to increase the coverage and accuracy of information on the subject---I picked it, after all, because I find it interesting. (I've also edited articles on universities that pay me money, and countries of which I'm a citizen.)
But I'm not quite sure on which side of the bright line this falls.
-Mark
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I would tend to say your subject doesn't -directly- pay you. There may be some indirect benefits to me if the town I live in does well, but the chances of biased editing on my part causing any real tangible gain to me is so tremendously slight that any conflict of interest effectively does not exist. On the other hand, my company -directly issues my paychecks-. This is the bright line. Editing an article on your subject would not be a COI. Editing an article on the university that employs you would be, I'd discourage that. Editing articles on the country you're a citizen of, well, again, that would be such a slight and indirect possibility of benefit that there's no COI.