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.
There is a good debate to be had about paid editing, the reward board, content created with a conflict of interest, etc.
I have an impression I have seen this film before.
Charles