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. I mean, do you guys really think that some guy is getting paid by Diebold to edit entries, from their location no less? C'mon, anyone that Diebold hired to do such a thing would almost certainly be working off-site. My guess is that it was just some guy at Diebold doing something that his superiors didn't even know about.
I would remind my fellow Wikipedians about this passage from WP:COI
COI edits are strongly discouraged. When they cause disruption to the encyclopedia in the opinion of an uninvolved administrator, they may lead to accounts being blocked and embarrassment for the individuals and groups who were being promoted.[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:COI#_note-0 Merely participating in or having professional expertise in a subject is not, by itself, a conflict of interest. Editors who may have a conflict of interesthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:COI#Editors_who_may_have_a_conflict_of_interestare not barred from participating in articles and discussion of articles where they have a conflict of interest, but must be careful when editing in mainspace.
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.
DC
Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2007 04:37:36 -0600
From: Daniel Cannon cannon.danielc@gmail.com Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Tracking ranges of anons To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: 46C428F0.7010207@gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
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David Gerard wrote:
I wouldn't bother with a block myself. They haven't edited as the IP in a while, so there's probably no imminent danger ... and you can bet people will be watching like hawks.
We may need to start stressing that we have no problem with people editing from the CIA, DIebold or the DNC ... what is problematic is a conflict of interest. A Diebold IP editing well is most welcome; a CIA IP fixing up Buffy The Vampire Slayer is fine.
Most definitely. The concern with Diebold is that they were editing in a manner that showed an obvious conflict of interest. While a block isn't really going to do anything to stop this in the future--the IP has been inactive for months, and after all of this, Diebold will probably block all its employees from Wikipedia--yet it gives the impression that we're doing something about it :) As you said, they'll be watching like hawks--and it's our credibility, moreso than Diebold's reputation, that is on the line (at least from where I'm sitting). A block shows that we are watching out for our 'pedia and that we don't condone such actions taken by corporations. (You've gotta keep in mind that a lot of people in the press haven't wrapped their head around this whole anybody-can-edit mentality, and assume that if Diebold is editing articles about itself, it's because we explicitly allowed them to do so.)
Daniel Cannon (AmiDaniel)
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.