Anthony wrote:
On 11/8/06, Gregory Kohs thekohser@gmail.com wrote:
Now, as a reminder, WP:COI says:
If you have a conflict of interest, you should:
- *avoid editing* articles related to your organization or its
competitors; 2. *avoid participating* in deletion discussionshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy#Deletion_processesabout articles related to your organization or its competitors;
Am I the only one who thinks point #2 is ridiculously stupid? I think it's a great thing to hear from an officer of an organization when considering whether or not to delete an article about the organization.
Does this carry over to people too? Should Angela not have participated in the discussion over whether or not to delete the article on her? Or is there something in particular about organizations here, that I'm not thinking of?
Asking someone to "avoid" participating does not imply disallowing that participation. It only warns them that this sometimes leads to conflicts. If Angela participates in a discussion about deleting an article about her why should anyone object. Her wiki work has made her notable, but the final decision on this is not hers. I have no reason to believe that her comments will be other than within the bounds of acceptable editing. What would be a conflict of interest would be for her to exercise her influence with the highest levels of WMF as the basis for either including or excluding an article about her.
I think that a significant segment of our editors are woefully ignorant about corporations. This is not surprising given either the academic or proletarian experiences of so many editors. If we were to survey our editors to determine how many owned corporate stock of any sort I suspect that the proportion would be very low. Even a determined leftist should have a basic understanding of corporations before he starts commenting on them. The Wall Street Journal has been published since 1889, but I wonder whether those who comment about the notability of a corporation have ever bothered to check whether anything has been written there about it. Basic information about any public corporations, its address, its products and its directors is certainly useful, but how much of that do we have?
Ec