Wikipedia talk:Conflict of interest/Proposal

I wrote this proposal because I ran into a conflict of interest where employees were writing about their own company, and I could not find adequate ethical guidance in the Wikipedia policies. I'm afraid that if we ignore this, the wikipedia might wind up being colonized by corporations just like the www was. Based on a Google search of Talk pages and a cursory review of company pages, this is not currently a big issue in Wikipedia. Conflict of interest has been brought up on very few occasions:

(please add instances you find, so we can build an understanding of what kind of guidance the community needs.) --Yannick 04:48, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

In addition to the links above and on the proposal page, Category:Companies may be useful in researching the value of this proposal. --Yannick 04:48, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

This particular topic is covered under (and is a subset of) Wikipedia:Vanity. --Death phoenix 05:07, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Seems to me that a vanity page is a particular example of a conflict of interest, so Wikipedia:Vanity page is a subset of this. Perhaps they should be merged? ··gracefool |☺ 10:35, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Given that in my opinion, and yours, this is not a big problem on Wikipedia, I think your proposed guidance cuts too deeply. Employees can jeapordize their employment based on the things they write about their employer, especially if that information is negative. I think the value in having people be able to speak freely without fear of retribution out weighs the danger of POV conflict of interest writing. POV and presentation problems will get sorted out sooner or later under existing policies. Dragons flight 05:09, Jun 17, 2005 (UTC)

I support whistleblowers, but an encyclopedia is not the right place to do it. --Yannick 05:44, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Many companies make it a fireable offense to say anything unapproved about a company even when it is well-known and verifiable (which it would have to be included in Wikipedia), and we should not deter the most knowledgable and interested people from making contributions by asking them to risk their job to do so. Dragons flight 05:51, Jun 17, 2005 (UTC)

There's something to this problem, definitely. Companies actively try to vet all outgoing information through a single group so that the company presents a single external face (that looks exactly like the company wants it to.) Also, as has already been mentioned, this kind of conflict of interest hasn't been a big problem so far. Perhaps when companies start paying people to edit Wikipedia, we will need to revisit this. Isomorphic 03:46, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I've a hunch that so far as this is an issue, it's a sub-issue of vanity. Fairly recently, I made very mild attempts to improve the expression of the guidelines on vanity, but I quickly realized that I disagreed with them so started up on the talk page. Unfortunately I ran out of energy there too. (I probably exhausted others' patience with a terribly verbose message written when sleepy.) Yes, WP is already colonized by companies to some extent. I'm not sure that this can be directly addressed. If the stuff isn't verifiable, then it has to go. But what about bullshit (so excellently elucidated by Harry Frankfurt)? Here is a pretty mild example: It provides also network infrastructure design, build-out and maintenance services, consulting solutions, customer installation and maintenance services, project management, operating systems development and maintenance and technical support.... What does "provides consulting solutions" mean? ("Charges for consultation"? Something else? Nothing at all?) I imagine that numerous companies would love to foist such soporific but vaguely grand-sounding bull on Wikipedia. -- Hoary 06:04, 2005 Jun 18 (UTC)

NDA

This has nothing to do with vanity.

I've written things both critical and praiseworthy about former employers on Wikipedia. The key there is former. The biggest issue, as seen on User:Linuxbeak's RfA is that users write about things when they have a contract with an employer or agency that says not to do that. This led to legal threats against the foundation and blanking of pages he contributed to. If there is a guideline here, it is "If you have a contract with someone about what you are writing, check the contract first." SchmuckyTheCat 3 July 2005 16:37 (UTC)