On 8/9/06, maru dubshinki marudubshinki@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.)