This COI editor seems to have been astonishingly brazen in their lives, but one can afford to be when there's little scrutiny of actions. It is a concern to have so many articles which receive no experienced editor attention for years—I wonder what could be a pragmatic step to take in this area. I believe admins have access to this page, which I can't view: Special:UnwatchedPages. Perhaps each one reading this could pick a few such pages and see if there's anything suspicious in their edit history, and then add the pages to their watchlists. But the issue here could be with pages that have one watchlister, a COI editor... — Bilorv (talk) 11:11, 28 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I think one good step would be to be very harsh in applying CoI policies to low-attention areas. I don't know if that's policy already, but it definitely should be. These areas receive little enough attention already, every bit that has to be wasted on cleaning up behind CoI is even more of a loss. Zarasophos (talk) 08:34, 29 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
If these companies "care a lot about their image", why don't they fix things? Wouldn't repairing a column be cheaper than battling a union for years on end? - Sumanuil (talk) 21:45, 28 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
You could see this as the purpose of a union, to make it more expensive for a company to resist workers' rights than provide them. But it doesn't seem difficult for me to imagine that repairing all of your companies' crumbling deathtraps in full would be more expensive than hiring a third party to whitewash your online image and losing a handful of days' labour to strikes. — Bilorv (talk) 22:19, 28 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Hiring one person (or having a computer-literate relative) to edit Wikipedia is far cheaper than making serious structural changes. Profitable businesses always pay as much as they have to, but only as little as they need to. -- llywrch (talk) 23:20, 29 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I thank the author for writing this piece; it's illustrative of the COI problem we, as a community, face since W?F cannot be bothered to help us. Chris Troutman (talk) 23:47, 28 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
