Wikipedia talk:Conflicts of interest (medicine)

Table of Good and Bad Edits

The current tabular form for the examples of good and bad edits is misleading. It suggests, for example, that pharma employees don't need to site sources (note that some pharma employees are accountants, etc.). It also suggests people with medical conditions should refrain from contributing, other than correcting obvious vandalism or libel against people. (Perhaps the more daring of them might even be permitted to take the initiative to correct spelling errors.) Three separate lists (the format just reverted without discussion) is both clearer and more consistent with Wikipedia policy: Everyone can contribute, and everyone should give reliable sources.

The change to three separate lists was reverted, along with all other changes, by the creator back to the creator's exact original[1], suggesting a sense of ownership. BitterGrey (talk) 23:53, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

I'm not even going to attempt to wade in between the two of you, it appears that this has become personal rather than an attempt to improve the encyclopedia (which is, in the end, why we're here). I'd strongly suggest that the two of you either choose to ignore each other for a while, take a break from editing, or have a nice cup of WP:TEA. If anything is truly that bad, another editor will notice it and fix it. Just as a random opinion, I prefer the tabular format, though it should be obvious that these are just examples and not specific prescriptions for specific audiences. I'm not going to write it myself, but I'm curious as to what specific recommendations should go in for me as an employee of a government health and regulatory agency. SDY (talk) 01:43, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

Hi SDY,

I hadn't thought about that case. The issues around promoting your employer would be the same: an editor could spam (say) links to the NIH website just like s/he could spam links to a corporate website. Such a person might also have a bit of a national focus, e.g., the US's recommendations for mammograms are the only ones worth mentioning.

I think it's important to associate specific situations with specific traps that those people are most likely to fall into. I'd thought at one point about having two examples for each type, but that would entail 20 different examples, and my imagination failed before I got very far. I didn't want to duplicate any items, because I thought that would be interpreted as indicating that only what was listed in 'your' row applied (whereas I think it reasonably clear that single examples apply to everyone), and I didn't want to have noticeably uneven numbers of examples, because it might imply that some groups were worse than others. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:27, 20 February 2011 (UTC)