[WikiEN-l] Is Slate an attack site?

[charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com]

Delirium 

> It seems to be brought up somewhat selectively, though. For example, 
> many of our nationalistic disputes are more or less conflicts of 
> interest: someone of nationality (or ancestry) X doing POV editing of an 
> article related to country X. It is not at all surprising to find an 
> edit war over an article with a title like [[X-Y conflict]] and find 
> that the two sides are, respectively, of nationalities X and Y (or 
> descended from them, or otherwise personally tied to them).

COI is about being too close to a topic, not about having some connection to it.

> On the other hand, people living in or otherwise connected with a 
> country are sometimes a valuable source for digging up cited information 
> about the country, when not engaged in edit wars about it. So we don't 
> generally make blanket rules like, "if you're from Sweden, you cannot 
> edit Sweden-related articles." And so with COIs in general, IMO.

There's the aspect of scale, or as I put it, "being close to the centre". Basically, the larger the group that would be excluded by the "Sweden" rule, the less we should worry. A connection that could be made of millions, such as membership of a world religion, is in practice and of itself not a particular cause of concern for COI. At the other end of the scale, individuals editing about themselves will proportionately cause many more problems.

The reason we don't have a solution to the nationalism issue is to do with the outside world, not Wikipedia. We do of course have the fundamental policy, that POV pushing is anyway unacceptable. 

Charles

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