On 11/8/06, Sam Korn smoddy@gmail.com wrote:

On 11/8/06, Gregory Kohs thekohser@gmail.com wrote:

...

I know that her edit was a trifling one, but considering all of the heat and light that's been generated in recent months about conflicts of interest, why is it that Beesley's account doesn't receive so much as a warning,

Now, what kind of "warning" do you consider appropriate? NPOV0 [1]? Welcomeenpov [2]?

Or perhaps you'd advocate some kind of hand-written warning?

Whatever you consider the appropriate warning to give, your comment is symptomatic of the terrible notion that giving a warning is a punishment of some kind and should be doled out to any editor who misbehaves somehow.

Handwritten, always. The warning templates are almost uniformly based around the assumption that a warning is a punishment, rather than an attempt to get someone to change their behavior.

Mark Wagner wrote:

On 11/8/06, Sam Korn smoddy@gmail.com wrote:

...

On 11/8/06, Gregory Kohs thekohser@gmail.com wrote:

...

I know that her edit was a trifling one, but considering all of the heat and light that's been generated in recent months about conflicts of interest, why is it that Beesley's account doesn't receive so much as a warning,

Now, what kind of "warning" do you consider appropriate? NPOV0 [1]? Welcomeenpov [2]?

Or perhaps you'd advocate some kind of hand-written warning?

Whatever you consider the appropriate warning to give, your comment is symptomatic of the terrible notion that giving a warning is a punishment of some kind and should be doled out to any editor who misbehaves somehow.

Handwritten, always. The warning templates are almost uniformly based around the assumption that a warning is a punishment, rather than an attempt to get someone to change their behavior.

Hmmm. Such warnings should only be issued by people with good penmanship.

Ec

Jimmy Wales wrote:

Gregory Kohs wrote:

...

Seriously, I know I'm trolling, but come on -- can anyone else see the hypocrisy here?

Hmm, a user banned for spamming wikipedia with pr puff pieces admits that he is trolling in making a silly complaint about nothing? Yeah, I think I do see the hypocrisy.

I'm glad to see I'm not the only newbie who sees it that way. ;-)

Ec

On 11/8/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:

So what!!!

Considering thr amount of problems we've had due to jimbo editing his bio I would suggest it is less than idea.

On 11/8/06, Angela beesley@gmail.com wrote:

There is no conflict of interest in me correcting a factual inaccuracy in the location of Wikia's main office, and the edit has nothing to with NPOV.

Angela.

Agreed. It's not a conflict of interest, and it's not a matter of POV. It would have been nice if you had cited a source, though (at least in the edit summary). But hindsight is 20/20.

Anthony

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:

1. *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

On 11/11/06, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:

Any ordinary person reading this in a straightforward way would take an instruction to "avoid" doing something as a statement that it is not allowed.

"Avoid" is pretty clear language in any case.

Wikipedia has a social environment which is different from many other places.

Generally you can even do things which are forbidden so long as everyone who cares agrees that doing so was good. This, of course, happens elsewhere too.. but it's quite common on Wikipedia. I've previously argued in detail that this is the natural result of working in an environment where almost everything can be totally undone with less effort than it took to do.

So the language we've used is just a reflection of reality: Your ability to get away with such edits is conditional on the approval of all the established Wikipedians who are watching. We can't tell people they are permitted to do something but then yell when they do something unacceptable, nor is it fair to give a firm no but later ignore the rule when they've done something everyone agrees on.

If we were to try to write a rule which explained the conditions we'd find that it would need to become nearly as long as the entire body of meta-discussion on Wikipedia before it did a good job at helping the reader tell if their action would be accepted or not ... even long standing and respected users sometimes have a hard time guessing how the community will react.

Telling users to avoid doing something and then saying that that doesn't prevent legitimate uses because it isn't a ban, is expecting everyone who reads the policies to be a Wikilawyer. This is absurd. Policies need to be comprehensible by ordinary people.

No. It's a hope that no one is a wikilawyer.

The rules are to help people quickly understand what is generally accepted and expected. A suggestion to avoid does exactly that... and only a wikilaywer wants rules to be more than that.

If the rule says you should avoid, but you do it, and the community does not agree.. This isn't time for you to start arguing rules.. this is the time for you to realize that it's the communities position which is actually binding.

On 11/11/06, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:

On Fri, 10 Nov 2006, Ray Saintonge wrote:

...

Asking someone to "avoid" participating does not imply disallowing that participation. It only warns them that this sometimes leads to conflicts.

Any ordinary person reading this in a straightforward way would take an instruction to "avoid" doing something as a statement that it is not allowed.

Yes, if what is really meant is that it's perfectly OK to participate in a deletion discussion over a company you work for, but that we want to "warn [people] that this sometimes leads to conflicts", then the page should be rewritten to warn people that "this" sometimes leads to conflicts, not to tell people to "avoid" "it".

'Cause I've always taken "avoid X" to mean "try not to do X", and I don't think I'm the only one who thinks this way.

And if I were writing the guideline, I'd say "X is encouraged", where X is "participating politely in a deletion discussion over yourself/your company/your favorite TV show/anything you know a lot about.

Anthony

On Sat, 11 Nov 2006, Ray Saintonge wrote:

...

Any ordinary person reading this in a straightforward way would take an instruction to "avoid" doing something as a statement that it is not allowed.

That may be consistent with your view of the "ordinary person", but others may see it differently. Avoidance is a restriction that one applies on one's own self. It does not depend on the imposition of external authority. It favours the exercise of judgement and the ability to know one's own limits.

My point is that anyone who reads that will interpret the *intentions of the writer* to be that the act is not allowed. It doesn't matter what he thinks avoidance is, but what he thinks the policy-maker meant by it.

An outright ban on an activity could easily be stated with less equivocation.,

Policies are full of attempts to state things in "less harsh" language that could easily have been said directly, but weren't. A reader would just think this is another one.

On 12/11/06, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:

...

That may be consistent with your view of the "ordinary person", but others may see it differently. Avoidance is a restriction that one applies on one's own self. It does not depend on the imposition of external authority. It favours the exercise of judgement and the ability to know one's own limits.

My point is that anyone who reads that will interpret the *intentions of the writer* to be that the act is not allowed. It doesn't matter what he thinks avoidance is, but what he thinks the policy-maker meant by it.

Really, whenever we say "avoid doing X", what we're trying to say something like "don't do X without a damn good reason, and by that we mean something which we would consider a damn good reason, not something which happens to be important to you."

It's just kind of hard to put it snappily. Suggestions appreciated.