Delirium

It seems to be brought up somewhat selectively, though. For example, many of our nationalistic disputes are more or less conflicts of interest: someone of nationality (or ancestry) X doing POV editing of an article related to country X. It is not at all surprising to find an edit war over an article with a title like [[X-Y conflict]] and find that the two sides are, respectively, of nationalities X and Y (or descended from them, or otherwise personally tied to them).

COI is about being too close to a topic, not about having some connection to it.

On the other hand, people living in or otherwise connected with a country are sometimes a valuable source for digging up cited information about the country, when not engaged in edit wars about it. So we don't generally make blanket rules like, "if you're from Sweden, you cannot edit Sweden-related articles." And so with COIs in general, IMO.

There's the aspect of scale, or as I put it, "being close to the centre". Basically, the larger the group that would be excluded by the "Sweden" rule, the less we should worry. A connection that could be made of millions, such as membership of a world religion, is in practice and of itself not a particular cause of concern for COI. At the other end of the scale, individuals editing about themselves will proportionately cause many more problems.

The reason we don't have a solution to the nationalism issue is to do with the outside world, not Wikipedia. We do of course have the fundamental policy, that POV pushing is anyway unacceptable.

Charles

----------------------------------------- Email sent from www.virginmedia.com/email Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software and scanned for spam