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