Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

At 12:04 PM 12/21/2009, David Gerard wrote:

...

This is the one you were taken to arbitration over, and was the source of your proposal that experts be banned from editing articles on their expertise.

Not at all, completely incorrect, even though asserted with succinct confidence.

<snip>

(3) I did propose, not that experts be banned from editing articles in their field of expertise, but that they be, on the one hand, considered to have a conflict of interest in general, and thus obligated to refrain from controversial editing *of articles*, but, on the other hand, generally protected as to expressing expert opinion on Talk pages. We should respect experts. WMC sometimes was quite reasonable when it came to actual facts and finding compromise text; the problem was when he used his administrative tools to enforce his position.

We have moved from the "smoke without fire" assertions at the head of this thread to this "distinction without a difference".

It needs to be said, tirelessly, that we do not consider anyone to have a conflict of interest unless they are putting their other interests ahead of the encyclopedia's. (Strangely enough, in a part of the post I snipped, you were making some comments and claims about the misuse of technical language in climate change articles. You are doing precisely this shuffle in involving COI in a sense that has no necessary application to WP in this manner.)

Charles