User talk:The Four Deuces/Archives/2021/March

Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest/Noticeboard#ADL_response

Hi The Four Deuces,

the discussion at WP:COIN seems to be carefully read by paid editors and/or their employer(s) to decide how to continue editing Wikipedia. When responding to such a discussion, please make sure that your comments are in line with policies and guidelines and actually address the edits, neither of which seems to be the case yet. In particular, ignoring the WP:PAID argument and the Nazi-related contributions while pushing the idea of "isn't a COI issue" seems to have potential to damage the project by encouraging problematic behavior. Statements like "I think the issue that some editors have is that they feel the extremist organizations the ADL investigates are correct in their views and that any criticism of them is biased." are further inacceptable as they imply that those disagreeing with you agree with extremist organizations.

Best regards,
~ ToBeFree (talk) 16:12, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

(wait a second, you even had participated in the GameStop discussion and made a much more agreeable comment back then!) ~ ToBeFree (talk) 16:21, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

In that case I objected to inclusion of reporting by the ADL about GameStop conspiracy theories since I thought it lacked weight for inclusion on the basis that the ADL was the only reliable source to mention it.[1] But note I based my decision of content policy rather than COI. (The suggestion had been made by an employee of the ADL.) I think that is the best way to handle this and it should only be accelerated if a problem is seen in the edits. We should assume good faith.

While COI has a section on citing oneself, which I did mention, the purpose of the policy is to protect articles from their subjects. It's human nature to want to remove negative information and add positive information about oneself, which presents a threat to weight and even accuracy. But that's not an issue with articles about third parties. I have always defended the right of editors of different views to edit articles provided they adhere to content policies and guidelines.

I made no mention of neo-Nazis. The ADL reports on many types of extremism such including anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, misogyny and racism. I follow the SPLC article and find that there are numerous defenders of groups that the SPLC classifies as hate groups. A typical comment is "I was fine with the SPLC when they went after racists, but I don't take them seriously any more." One of the editors at GameStop made a similar comment about the ADL: "I think groups like ADL were originally used as sources for fringe racist groups, but it ends up being a slippery slope so that they're being used on any page now."

TFD (talk) 19:55, 28 March 2021 (UTC)