William Pietri wrote:
Right. And although the questions are endlessly complicated, I think the solution is simple. Interests are fine, especially when declared. Conflicts of interest, real or apparent, are forbidden. In practice, this means that if anybody raises a reasonable conflict-of-interest concern, especially one with a pecuniary motivation, the editor steps back and makes their suggestions on the talk page. And that we rule out obvious conflicts from the beginning, in exactly the same way the various journalistic codes of ethics I linked to do now.
My point, though, is that there are *almost always* conflicts of interest, especially with the sort of qualified editors we would most like to attract. Someone who does extensive work in CS and holds an academic job in that position has a conflict of interest when it comes to editing CS-related articles, especially any related to his area of research... but we hardly want to ban experts in CS from editing CS-related articles! I don't see monetary influence as being a worse sort of conflict (except for PR reasons). My proposal instead would be to simply ask editors to disclose potential conflicts of interest and be cautious when editing articles to which they might apply. Thus when editing machine-learning-related articles, I would disclose that I research in the area and mostly publish in the statistical side of the statistical-vs-symbolic split, but this wouldn't disqualify me from editing machine-learning-related articles, either of the statistical or symbolic variety.
-Mark