A not really hypothetical question:
Let say one is the director of marketing at a 16 billion dollar company and
decides to come to Wikipedia in an attempt to alter its coverage of one of
your companies key products (which has been hit fairly hard lately by the
evidence). One also invites 50 of your best friends (most of which are on
your pay role to join you in this effort).
Let say you are trying to do it anonymously but both you and your
associates send out a whole bunch of intimidating emails to a long standing
editor. Than this long standing editor without any real difficulty figures
out who you are (as you sort of did email him). You than "vanish" from
Wikipedia.
What if this long standing editor decided to either hand the story over to
the press or write something up for publication in a peer review journal as
said editor does not stand for intimidation easily? And this long standing
editor believes that the world / patients might be better off if
this behavior become more widely known. How would the Wikimedia community
apply the above two policies / guidelines (WP:COI and WP:OUTING)?
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine
www.opentextbookofmedicine.com