On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 10:17 AM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com 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.
-- Tim Starling
-- -Ian Woollard
We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly imperfect world things would be a lot better.
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And if your town did pay you (for example, if you were employed in some way by it), you shouldn't be writing about it. I believe you've found the exact correct dividing line. I may live in Denver, but I have no particular interest in promoting it, and no one's paying me to do so, so me writing about it would not involve any particular conflict of interest. I may speak English, but again, I won't get paid more if English is somehow promoted, so there's no possibility of a conflict of interest if I edit the article on the language. On the other hand, I would certainly refrain from editing the article on my employer (aside from simple stuff like reverts of obvious vandalism), because whether real or not, there would be a possible conflict of interest in that scenario. Better to let others who aren't involved write that article, there are many others I can write instead. If I were to own my own business, or became notable enough for there to be an article on me personally, I would similarly refrain from editing or creating any such article, because there simply wouldn't be the objectivity there that we all should strive for.