User:Aphzidos

Conflict of Interest Declaration
Hi, I'm an employee of AAAS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science. I'm a webmaster and a former Biology grad student.

I'm a strong believer in neutral and unbiased entries on Wikipedia. However, I also believe that there are many entries that will not be updated or improved without action by the page's subject. I believe the solution is very careful action: that if an employee of the entry's subject updates the page, they should make atomic edits, and those edits should (obviously) be carefully written to be unbiased and well-sourced.

In my employer's case, this is usually an update to the identities of board members that change each year.

Since I've seen the Conflict of Interest policy misued, I feel it necessary to point out that you are not banned from editing your employer's page. You're merely strongly discouraged from doing so. That's why I don't edit it for fun.


 * Editors with COIs are strongly encouraged—but not actually required—to declare their interests, both on their user pages and on the talk page of the related article they are editing, particularly if those edits may be contested. Editors who disguise their COIs are often exposed, creating a perception that they, and perhaps their employer, are trying to distort Wikipedia. When someone voluntarily discloses a conflict of interest, other editors should always assume the editor is trying to do the right thing. Do not use a voluntarily disclosed conflict of interest as a weapon against the editor.

That all sounds very argumentative and possibly challenging, but in fact it's very simple. For me, "advancing outside interests" is never "more important to [me] than advancing the aims of Wikipedia." I'm only interested in updating the page.

Finally, I find it very amusing that the COI policy encourages you to declare your interest, even though you are not allowed to do so within your username. When my original name described me as an employee of AAAS, the reaction was quite strong.

Editorial Interests
According to my past edits, I appear to highly favor the proper use of punctuation and correct forms of words. Yeesh, how boring.

--Aphzidos (talk) 18:48, 4 March 2011 (UTC)