Wikinews talk:Conflict of interest

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Contents 1 I have been bold 1.1 Discussion 2 Input 3 Template

[edit] I have been bold

I have been bold and tagged this as an official policy. It is largely adapted from the corresponding policy on Wikipedia so there may well be some niggles to work out in how it relates to Wikinews.

• First off, does anyone object to this being official policy? I was prompted to import it when we had people from the Church of Scientology trying to edit articles about them.
• Second, although it has been gone through and adapted to suit Wikinews are there any specific areas it does not cover, or covers inappropriately?
• Lastly, in being bold, tagging this as official policy, and semi-protecting it do people think we should institute a vote instead? --Brian McNeil / ^talk 10:12, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Discussion

• Support this action by Brianmc (talk · contribs), I think this is a very good idea, especially as applied to groups and organizations, and representatives of those groups or individuals with financial ties to specific organizations. Will go through this and provide some comments as to how it could perhaps be better applied specifically to Wikinews. It may also be helpful to write some kind of a Guide to how specific parties could contribute in a constructive manner, perhaps by placing a fully-formatted and researched article for review on a talk page, or on a Wikinews Preparation subpage. Cirt - (talk) 10:30, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
• Support On february 10 we got protesters covering their protests. We need this policy.--Anonymous101 (talk · contribs) 06:17, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Input

Hi, Cirt has asked me to offer feedback on this page. Although I rarely log in at Wikinews, I have a lot of experience dealing with conflict of interest issues on en:Wikipedia. This policy could be better than it is.

The policy needs to mimic a real world understanding of conflict of interest. That hinges upon the appearance of impropriety. Partly, the policy is here to protect the integrity of the project. It's also here to help individuals and the organizations they represent avoid harming themselves. The business world in general is not well versed in how wikis operate and often underestimates the danger of a public relations backlash from aggressive editing. When the real world press picks up on a COI story at en:Wiki, in the space of a few hours those individuals often find themselves with a public relations nightmare several orders of magnitude worse than whatever problem they were trying to fix.

Also, the disclosure issue ought to be clear and firm: do disclose a conflict of interest (even a potential one) and disclose it clearly on one's userpage. The benchmark for when and how much to disclose is if this came out by other means, how would it look to an uninvolved observer? Yes, it may constrain an editor's involvement somewhat to have a disclosed conflict of interest. But that's far better than the consequences of someone else bringing the same information to the public's attention.

If people aren't sure what I'm talking about, I could bring up examples from the United States congressional editing scandal of Jan. 2006, the Microsoft editing scandal of January 2007, or the WikiScanner editing scandals. Durova - (talk) 23:38, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

All of which Wikinews has articles on, if anyone wants the "crib notes" version. And I agree that the main issue with COI is to deal with any possible interpretation of impropriety - while I'm personally confident I didn't let my COI influence my interview, I still declared it. Chris Mann (Say hi!|Stalk me!) 23:51, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

I've added a section down the bottom on the consequences of "outing" a COI editor. Chris Mann (Say hi!|Stalk me!) 00:05, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

I was pretty sure you did have articles on those incidents, thanks. :) Durova - (talk) 05:52, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

Yes, and what was a real pain in the ass is the Congressional one was pre-WikiScanner. Amgine and I manually checked the edits from Congress' IP range. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 11:48, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Template

New template, see {{COI}} -- Cirt - (talk) 18:34, 9 May 2008 (UTC)