Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
At 12:04 PM 12/21/2009, David Gerard wrote:
This is the one you were taken to arbitration
over, and was the source
of your proposal that experts be banned from editing articles on their
expertise.
Not at all, completely incorrect, even though asserted with succinct
confidence.
<snip>
(3) I did propose, not that experts be banned from
editing articles
in their field of expertise, but that they be, on the one hand,
considered to have a conflict of interest in general, and thus
obligated to refrain from controversial editing *of articles*, but,
on the other hand, generally protected as to expressing expert
opinion on Talk pages. We should respect experts. WMC sometimes was
quite reasonable when it came to actual facts and finding compromise
text; the problem was when he used his administrative tools to
enforce his position.
We have moved from the "smoke without fire" assertions at the head of
this thread to this "distinction without a difference".
It needs to be said, tirelessly, that we do not consider anyone to have
a conflict of interest unless they are putting their other interests
ahead of the encyclopedia's. (Strangely enough, in a part of the post I
snipped, you were making some comments and claims about the misuse of
technical language in climate change articles. You are doing precisely
this shuffle in involving COI in a sense that has no necessary
application to WP in this manner.)
Charles