William Pietri wrote:
Someone who does extensive work in CS can edit the 99% of CS articles where the do not have a strong conflict of interest. I have absolutely asked passionate topic experts, no matter how qualified, to not edit on their personal pet projects. There are areas where I have strong expertise that I don't touch for the same reason: I'm a partisan.
I have two articles on my watchlist where editors that I know have a conflict of interest have made significant contributions to the current version. Having checked out those contributions to make sure they were NPOV and otherwise within Wikipedia guidelines, I've seen no problems and so have largely left them be. The net result is a positive increase in Wikipedia's quality.
I can also think of at least one article on my watchlist where an editor with a strong conflict of interest showed up and made a mockery of NPOV and other such guidelines with his contributions. In that case I and some other editors worked to make sure the article conformed to policy and ultimately wound up driving off the problem editor (we tried to fix him first, of course, but it just wasn't going to happen with this guy). I'm sure there are many other such examples like this, it's just the one case that pops to mind right now.
So IMO conflict of interest is a condition that can be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, I don't feel it is appropriate to rigidly enforce a one-size-fits-all rulebook. The [[Wikipedia:Conflict of interest]] guideline is useful as one tool among many to thwack the folks who are unable to be properly neutral when editing some subject.