On 17 April 2014 16:25, Michael Snow wikipedia@frontier.com wrote:
To illustrate how silly this can get on some level, consider the fact that justifiably or not, the media and the general public often treat the content of Wikimedia projects as if it reflects on the reputation of the Wikimedia Foundation. Thus when "broadly construed", any edit to any article could in a sense be charged with a conflict of interest because it's an effort to make the Wikimedia Foundation look better. So basically staff would not be allowed to edit at all, and the second part of this policy would amount to no more than a limited exception under which all edits have to be made, or at the very least vetted, by the legal department. That in turn would lead to an atmosphere in which staff edits must be considered authoritative and cannot be challenged or altered by the community, which I really don't think is the direction we should go. The occasional deference Pete was concerned about is already a distortion of the normal editing dynamic, and not something we want to try and spread more widely.
We also have ample real-world evidence that there is literally no limit to the querulousness of banned users. Going to great effort to carefully craft a stick for them to wield strikes me as not a productive pastime.
- d.