On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 1:41 PM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
On 21 June 2012 12:35, Martijn Hoekstra martijnhoekstra@gmail.com wrote:
Not bad David!
I tend to take a bit more of a liberal guideline on fixing obvious blatant vandalism: "Google CEO Larry Page is a great big poopyhead" should be reverted no matter what, even if you have a conflict of interest, or are Larry Page himself, and would have thought this is generally accepted in the community.
We are wedded to consensus; yet David had to walk a thin line. We are not really used to giving prudential advice. In concrete situations I hold myself to giving "correct" advice. The thing is that I am probably using contextual cues that are hard to describe. (I'd better stop here since I feel a go metaphor coming on.)
Charles
I do appreciate the difficulty here. Advice like the above should not be mistaken to also mean that one should revert "writer x of some obscure weblog described Larry Page as a great big poopyhead[1]". That should also be fixed, but a step back there and taking the talkpage route is the good idea there for a COI editor. That's a subtle point to explain to a Wikipedia newcomer.