[WikiEN-l] Current consensus on PR editing?

[Martijn Hoekstra]

On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 1:41 PM, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> On 21 June 2012 12:35, Martijn Hoekstra <martijnhoekstra at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Not bad David!
>>
>> I tend to take a bit more of a liberal guideline on fixing obvious
>> blatant vandalism: "Google CEO Larry Page is a great big poopyhead"
>> should be reverted no matter what, even if you have a conflict of
>> interest, or are Larry Page himself, and would have thought this is
>> generally accepted in the community.
>
> We are wedded to consensus; yet David had to walk a thin line. We are
> not really used to giving prudential advice. In concrete situations I
> hold myself to giving "correct" advice. The thing is that I am
> probably using contextual cues that are hard to describe. (I'd better
> stop here since I feel a go metaphor coming on.)
>
> Charles
>

I do appreciate the difficulty here. Advice like the above should not
be mistaken to also mean that one should revert "writer x of some
obscure weblog described Larry Page as a great big poopyhead[1]". That
should also be fixed, but a step back there and taking the talkpage
route is the good idea there for a COI editor. That's a subtle point
to explain to a Wikipedia newcomer.