[WikiEN-l] Is Slate an attack site?

[charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com]

Fred Bauder wrote

>> Anonymity, bans, and rules against conflicts of interest don't get
>> along together.  You can't choose all three.
> 
> _______________________________________________
> 
> You're on to something there. And we have chosen all three. My suggestion would be to abandon anonymity.

I wouldn't be quite so gloomy. One thing our permissive policy does quite well is to allow quite large samples of an editor's style to be racked up. We have hardly yet got into automation of a "fingerprint" that would allow identification


Our detection of COI has in many cases been because people with a conflict of interest push a stupidly crude POV line. Undetected COI can very easily be present in those who play just inside the rules. The reason that isn't a scandal is because the effort from Day 1 has really been to get people on the site to accept the rules. We could find many more cases if we went looking for people who only edited to push articles in one direction, not towards neutrality from any direction. 

It is questionable, though, whether the project as a whole would benefit. There must be large numbers of editors who let a nationalist agenda show on some topics, but are otherwise make good contributions. We need really need only to trim the more extreme cases of COI, editors who are far too close to the topic.


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