User:CircleGirl/COICase



I have discovered that User:Dr Greg Wood has a possible Conflict of Interest. I was editing the Criticism of the Work Capability Assessment article. I quickly noticed that the article had a strong bias. I also noticed there was a section describing a doctor who had worked for Atos (the company who used to run the Work Capability Assessment). and had whistleblown on Atos. Oddly, this did not name the doctor. I looked at the references on this section and noticed that the doctor in question was named Greg Wood. Here is a link to the article before I edited it. I knew that people weren't supposed to edit Wikipedia articles about themselves, but I wasn't very familiar with the rules around this. I looked at WP:COI. It mentioned that naming editors should be avoided, so I asked on the editor request for help page if this user had COI, using a pseudonym for Greg Wood.. responded that it could potentially be COI. He also told me that he had worked out who the editor in question was and had contacted them. User:Dr Greg Wood later responded that he was the doctor who blew the whistle on Atos on his talk page, but denied he had a conflict of interest. I decided to look into how the content that refered to Greg Wood came to be on the page.

I found that the Criticism of the Work Capability Assessment had been split from the Work Capability Assessment article. I found that Dr Greg Wood had added the content on 15 August 2014. He cites two sources; both of which are interviews that he gave to different media outlets. He edited the content again 3 times on the same day. Here are all the other edits that he has made regarding his actions:

2014

 * 21 August
 * 15 September
 * 17 September
 * 26 September

2015

 * 23 May
 * 16 June
 * 17 June
 * 18 June.
 * 5 July.

2016

 * 31 January
 * 1 February.
 * 9 May.
 * 10 May
 * 11 May
 * 12 May
 * 14 May
 * 19 September
 * 20 September
 * 21 September
 * 22 September
 * 23 September
 * 24 September
 * 29 September
 * 30 September
 * 1 October
 * 2 October
 * 3 October
 * 4 October
 * 5 October
 * 6 October
 * 7 October
 * 8 October
 * 9 October
 * 10 October
 * 13 October
 * 15 October
 * 18 October
 * 22 October
 * 23 October
 * 24 October
 * 6 November
 * 11 December

2017

 * 15 January
 * 16 January
 * 18 January
 * 20 January
 * 2 February
 * 9 February

On 27 June 2017, the Work Capability Assessment article was split and a new article: Criticism of the Work Capability Assessment was created, which included the section on Dr Greg Wood's actions. He made the following edits relating to his actions:


 * 5 July
 * 6 July
 * 7 July

On 25 August, the page was nominated for deletion. Dr Greg Wood advocated keeping the article.


 * 5 September

Dr Greg Wood has also contributed significantly to other articles in relation to the Work Capability Assessment. I'm not sure if he has a conflict of interest in relation to these articles, but I feel he has put an undue emphasis on the Work Capability Assessment.


 * Employment Support Allowance
 * Incapacity Benefit
 * Carol M. Black
 * Paul Litchfield

In the case of the Incapacity Benefit article, I removed some content relating to the Work Capability Assessment, but Dr Greg Wood reverted my edits to put the content back.. I initially removed this again, but realised it would be in violation of WP:1RR so I put it back.

CircleGirl (talk) 02:39, 29 December 2018 (UTC)