On 8/16/07, Dick Clark crotalus@gmail.com wrote:
People who don't understand our project say all sorts of things. So far as I can tell, there is no evidence that "Diebold" edited any articles. Now, of course there is evidence that someone from the Diebold IP range did. We shouldn't attribute actions to a group when the group is not likely the responsible party.
Yeah, the entries that were supposedly "written by the CIA" (*) were pretty obviously done by a certain IT employee there. (If I came right out and said his name or position would I be accused of "outing" a Wikipedian?)
(*) I like how the first edit from him was vandalism - changing "smurf attack" to "turd attack" - http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Smurf_attack&diff=prev&old...
There is no policy against Diebold employees editing the Diebold article. There are policies requiring NPOV, RS, etc. Let's not complicate things by introducing a competing COI standard now. The existing policies work just fine.
I disagree with your conclusion. Obvious false or biased information is often removed from articles eventually, but not without sometimes causing a lot of unnecessary work. And more subtle false or biased edits are even more difficult or impossible to fix under existing policies.