[WikiEN-l] Norman Technologies AfD

[Kirill Lokshin]

On 8/9/06, maru dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is an absurd block. He was writing perfectly fine, well-written,
> *referenced* articles and has so far as I know scrupulously followed
> the notability guidelines; would to God that we had a thousand more
> like him, and could ditch the bottom thousand editors.  And you are
> banning him because the conflict of interest *might* lead to POV? Have
> the project abandoned AGF and the notion that one can write in a NPOV
> fashion even if POV oneself?

I would argue that this goes back to that whole "bringing the project
into disrepute" thing that's come up a few times now.  It may very
well be that his articles are perfectly fine (although I suspect that
many are quite borderline in terms of either reliable outside sources
or notability); but the issue is the *appearance* of impropriety more
so than the contents of the articles themselves.  We cannot afford to
leave the public with the impression that certain articles are in
Wikipedia only because money has changed hands to keep them there; the
way MyWikiBiz was being advertised gave precisely that impression --
regardless of whether he was actually following notability guidelines
or not!  (Indeed, promises like "If your organization is deemed
non-notable, your payment will be immediately refunded" are probably
*more* problematic, as they are likely to be interpreted as giving a
pretty obvious motivation to make sure that the article sticks
around.)

-- 
Kirill Lokshin