> A not really hypothetical question: > > Let say one is the director of marketing at a 16 billion dollar company > and > decides to come to Wikipedia in an attempt to alter its coverage of one > of > your companies key products (which has been hit fairly hard lately by the > evidence). One also invites 50 of your best friends (most of which are on > your pay role to join you in this effort). > > Let say you are trying to do it anonymously but both you and your > associates send out a whole bunch of intimidating emails to a long > standing > editor. Than this long standing editor without any real difficulty > figures > out who you are (as you sort of did email him). You than "vanish" from > Wikipedia. > > What if this long standing editor decided to either hand the story over > to > the press or write something up for publication in a peer review journal > as > said editor does not stand for intimidation easily? And this long > standing > editor believes that the world / patients might be better off if > this behavior become more widely known. How would the Wikimedia community > apply the above two policies / guidelines (WP:COI and WP:OUTING)? > > -- > James Heilman > MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
Our prohibitions against "outing" of the personal information of other editors refers to on-wiki accusations and guesses. You can use that information freely with respect to private communications with administrators or the arbitration committee regarding socking and conflict of interest issues. On-wiki communications regarding conflict of interest editing is OK but should omit such personal information. If Wikipedia processes are ineffective in dealing with the problem, publication off-wiki, particularly in a peer-reviewed journal, is acceptable in my view as assuming power over an issue and information concerning it implies a responsibility to deal with it adequately. However, I hope you will attempt to use our processes before you do something that may be damaging to our public image. Please give us a chance. For one thing, if there are grounds, our checkuser crew can often ferret out sock puppets and where they originate; you would have to promptly, probably before any legal controversy is ripe or before a court, obtain a court order to get that information on your own if editing was done using an account name. A note regarding evidence that you might need in defending a possible libel action: edits containing personal identifying information may be deleted or suppressed under our policies and can be retrieved later only under the terms of a court order, so, obviously, get them before they are hidden. Fred Bauder _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l