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	:::::Also, the true source of so much hostility and conspiracy speculation is the very large number of cases where such behavior is actually warranted. The astroturfing firms that are getting increasingly clever in hiding their financial connection make it increasingly difficult for Wikipedians to know who is a regular volunteer and who is actually a covert meatpuppet of a commercial interest. This leads to a sort of justified paranoia and a contentious environment on Misplaced Pages, both for paid editors and anyone who happens to add positive information about a company. It creates editors so frustrated with corporations that they take anti-corporate stances in content and participation. I am actually working on something that could make substantial impact, but I don't really feel the Misplaced Pages community itself is equipped to have thoughtful, progressive discussion that leads to meaningful decisions and actions. ] (]) 00:16, 14 September 2015 (UTC)		:::::Also, the true source of so much hostility and conspiracy speculation is the very large number of cases where such behavior is actually warranted. The astroturfing firms that are getting increasingly clever in hiding their financial connection make it increasingly difficult for Wikipedians to know who is a regular volunteer and who is actually a covert meatpuppet of a commercial interest. This leads to a sort of justified paranoia and a contentious environment on Misplaced Pages, both for paid editors and anyone who happens to add positive information about a company. It creates editors so frustrated with corporations that they take anti-corporate stances in content and participation. I am actually working on something that could make substantial impact, but I don't really feel the Misplaced Pages community itself is equipped to have thoughtful, progressive discussion that leads to meaningful decisions and actions. ] (]) 00:16, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

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You're in the news

In case you didn't know, you were quoted in Die Zeit today in an article about the Orangemoody case . -- Brianhe (talk) 21:38, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

@Brianhe: Thanks for letting me know. They seem to be referring to this data. Some of it sounds incorrect, but it's hard to tell across languages through Google Translate. CorporateM (Talk) 22:43, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

Ein solcher bezahlter Misplaced Pages-Autor ist David King, der als "CorporateM" seit 2009 in der Misplaced Pages mitschreibt. Er sieht vor allem die Unerfahrenheit der Werber als Problem: "Ich schätze, dass zehn bis 20 Prozent der Änderungen mit einem Interessenkonflikt trotzdem nützlich für den Artikel sind", schreibt er in einer aktuellen Diskussion um das bezahlte Schreiben. Allerdings würden nur zehn Prozent der schädlichen Beiträge aus böser Absicht eingestellt. Viel öfter würden die Eigenwerber aus Unwissenheit handeln und könnten sich nicht in den von Misplaced Pages geforderten "neutralen Benutzerstandpunkt" hineinversetzen. Dieser Gruppe will King seine Dienste anbieten. Allerdings bekommen seine Kunden keine Artikel garantiert. "In 70 Prozent der Fälle empfehle ich meinen Kunden, dass sie sich aus der Misplaced Pages raushalten sollen", schreibt King auf seiner Nutzerseite.
Translation:
Such a paid Misplaced Pages editor is David King, who writes as "CorporateM" in Misplaced Pages since 2009. He mainly sees the inexperience of the applicant as a problem: "I guess that 10 to 20 percent of the changes with a conflict of interest are still useful for the article," he writes in a current discussion about paid writing. However, only 10 percent of the harmful contributions could be attributed to (?) bad faith. More often self-promoters act out of ignorance and can't write from the "neutral point of view" (neutralen Benutzerstandpunkt, got to love 5-syllable German words - tr.) required by Misplaced Pages. King wants to offer his services to this group. However, his customers don't get a guaranteed article. "In 70 percent of cases, I recommend to my clients that they should stay out of Misplaced Pages", King writes on his user page.
— Die Zeit, 1 September 2015

Yup, this is incorrect. For example, the following appears to be a completely fabricated statement: "However, his customers don't get a guaranteed article". Where did they get this from? It's not in the Signpost and they never spoke to me. Most of my work is not on new articles either. Saying I recommend that "my clients" abstain from Misplaced Pages doesn't make sense either. How could they be clients if I recommend they do nothing? The recommendation has the natural outcome of them not becoming clients. Unfortunately it's very rare for the press to actually get their facts right on these issues. CorporateM (Talk) 01:19, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

The Zeit article sent me here, so I thought I'd comment on the wording "clients". While it sounds misleading in the English translation, to most German readers it will be clear that you are not working for them. "Kunde" also means "customer", i. e. it doesn't necessarily involve a formal contract (as in being a grocery store's customer). One can in fact say: "There was a customer in today who didn't buy anything." Makes the person not a customer in the strcit sense, but is frequently used colloquially. "However, his customers don't get a guaranteed article" should be read in the same spirit.

So while you are right in that the wording is not 100% accurate, it will be understood in line with your intentions and practices.--Cirdan (talk) 08:45, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Aww - thanks for clarifying @Cirdan:!!! CorporateM (Talk) 14:00, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Aka 'potential customers' slash 'potential clients' is what the article is saying. But in fact, due to selection bias (which I believe you mentioned in your proposal) these are not actually 'potential clients' but are in fact 'potential clients that actively contacted your firm'. Are the slides available, or the more detailed data than what is summarized at WP:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-08-12/Forum? Do you have any guesstimates on what the pool of 'potential clients that did NOT actively contact your firm' might look like, aka what the "overall hypothetical market" profile is like compared to what the "already in the market" profile is like? 75.108.94.227 (talk) 22:37, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Civility Barnstar
	For your handling on ANI. sovereign°sentinel (contribs) 02:19, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Greenhouse Software

Does this article look like an advertisement to you? The article creator nominated this for DYK: Template:Did you know nominations/Greenhouse Software. sovereign°sentinel (contribs) 02:34, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

Abstain Sorry @Sovereign Sentinel:. Please see paragraph 2 of my user page. As a result of the mandated disclosure of my personal identity, I will no longer get involved in business pages on a volunteer basis. I will probably retire from Misplaced Pages completely within a few years. CorporateM (Talk) 14:04, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

Um, OK then. sovereign°sentinel (contribs) 14:06, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

wider scope

Hello CorporateM, since I've been curious for some time, and my curiosity is not abating, I figured that I would ask. Feel free to abstain from this discussion as well, if need be. Is this permanent? As in, do you see no way forward? Belatedly noticed the AN/I thread, and belated commented there, but actually came here a few days back, following User:Brianhe around (they requested I stalk their edit-history related to the 'orangemoody' incident... but may regret their request since we disagree on long-term strategy :-)

And although I've heard your username before, and seen you "doing stuff" on the 'pedia, pretty sure we've never interacted directly before, on articles or talkpages. Again, though, I stress that satisfying my curiosity is 100% per your WP:CHOICE, as to whether you want (or do not want) to have a usertalk discussion about the best long term strategy for wikipedia, vis-a-vis capitalism, and/or vis-a-vis the real world of People With Agendas. I'm interested in your personal outcome, aka if you will continue editing wikipedia or think it is a lost cause, but I'm also interested in your thoughts on the broader future of the 'pedia. Best, 75.108.94.227 (talk) 13:13, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

Hi IP address. Yes it is permanent. I have edited hundreds, maybe thousands of company and BLP pages on a volunteer basis. There is a very well established precedence on Misplaced Pages, on other websites, and based on my personal experiences, that doing so from an account with a disclosed personal identity results in harassment, bullying, lawsuits and other nonsense from article-subjects and opinionated editors. In fact, immediately after I disclosed, I started getting an overwhelming number of spam emails, which I'm pretty sure has something to do with one of the editors making a smug comment associating paid editing with spam. And some of the very editors lobbying me to disclose my real-world identity have themselves experienced very serious consequences of doing so. These risks may be in a small number of cases, but it only takes one to eliminate all the benefit I get from editing on a volunteer basis, which is to say I get no benefit, but accept substantial personal risk. I would rather just spend my time elsewhere and it's Misplaced Pages's loss, not mine.

As for the paid editing, I will eventually retire here completely as well, but it will take longer to transition. Basically this isn't a community I want to be a part of. If article-subjects and their representatives that attempt to participate here ethically are given an extreme amount of ABF, a bias against edits that favor them, and a lack of privacy or protection from harassment, I see no reason for them to disclose, when there are so many benefits to not doing so. How can I continue to operate a business that promotes ethical practices, if the best advice I can give them is to be covert?

I can get paid more and be treated with more respect with less drama at a real job. And once again, it's Misplaced Pages's loss that it will have less GA content that I otherwise would have produced, and fewer article-subjects will be educated on Misplaced Pages's rules, creating more problematic editing. I will ultimately be better off without Misplaced Pages in the long-run and Misplaced Pages will have been diminished. David King, Ethical Wiki (Talk) 14:58, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

Ok, now I'm curious; what is the disagreement over how to handle the Orangemoody case? My understanding of it is such that it is hard to imagine there being different viewpoints. David King, Ethical Wiki (Talk) 15:37, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

Curiousity satisfied, deserves quid pro quo. :-) So the first bit of my reply is on gory orangemoody details, before I clumsily-or-not-so-clumsily segue into my ideas on your sit. Please call me 75.108 for short if you like, I'm allergic to "IP" since that is my computer's name not mine; I wasn't sure whether you preferred to be David or CorporateM or if you are happy either way ... but I flat out won't call you The King because *that* honorific is taken, sir, taken I say! ;-) Orangemoody is straightforward, everybody dislikes socking dishonest reprehensible unethical behavior. Right? Right. But there are differences over how to prevent future orangemoody imitators, and how to run wikipedia going forward, so as to best accomplish her overall goals. So, taking it in roughly reverse order of what you mentioned:

some thoughts on how to best beat hypothetical future orangemoody-imitators
Case in point, I think that when using press-reports that quote anonymous wikipedia insiders, saying inflammatory things about the socks in question, in our article about the orangemoody incident, we have to be very careful about WP:CIRCULAR. Even if there is no real legal risk to wikipedia by using inflammatory legalese to describe the socks as a group, there is a reputational risk, aka the risk that wikipedia-the-brand will "lose face" in the eyes of the public, or even 'merely' in the eyes of the editing public. So I'm advocating that we treat the socks as checkuser-confirmed socks... which is to say 99% certainty... but that we treat ALL other allegations as merely allegations, and stick strictly to the barest and most neutral of factoids, letting the readership make up their own mind, and simply omit the inflammatory language. The long-term risk, in my view, is that future orangemoody imitators will take advantage of the flaws in checkuser (I'd like to be vague about how this might be done), and rope in some innocent editors that LOOK like checkuser-confirmed-bad-apples but are not... a strict policy that wikipedia treats the humans behind the 99%-confirmed socks as committing alleged violations of this or that wiki-policy, and careful avoidance of legalese whenever possible ("the sock violated WP:COPYVIO" is distinct from "the human defendant infringed upon legally copyrighted material which is a prosecutable violation of international law" to give you the flavor of what I prefer versus what I want to avoid... not that we actually use the latter language, but we are too far along the linguistic spectrum methinks). I'm not 100.000% positive that such roping-in-of-fairly-legit-editors did not happen in the orangemoody incident, for at least one case, who shall remain nameless per WP:NPA. Anyways, if the de facto policy is that we delete all articles of the hypothetical future sockring, and heap linguistic abuse upon the sockring-participating-humans without regard to WP:NICE and WP:NLT, I foresee problems. User:Brianhe sees this as worrying-about-the-spammer, and there is some truth to that: if my policy is implemented, 99% of the time it will 'benefit' the spammer, since calling them a spade, rather than a single-user geomorphological manipulator, is all that Brianhe thinks we ought to be doing. Of course, in my mind it won't hurt us to call 'checkuser-confirmed socks' exactly that, as long as we are doing our damnedest to prevent future such checkuser-confirmed socks from misusing wikipedia. Outside the question of how to write the Conflict of interest editing of Misplaced Pages article, and spinoff-subsidiaries thereof... somebody, turns out it was User:davidwr, added a hatnote linking the orangemoody article to the checkuser-evidence-page for instance which I think is just really the wrong direction to be trending if we want to avoid the Eye Of The Navel... there are also legitimate disagreements about how to best defend the 'pedia against future orangemoody-imitators, and vaguely similar hypothetical future incidents. There are plenty of proposals to force disclosures of various types (sometimes only for a subset of articles at first aka the usual slippery slope), plenty of proposals to implement super-WP:42 wiki-notability requirements (again but more often a slippery slope is explicitly proposed e.g. only BLP or only corp or whatever). There are also specific proposals about how to lock down AfC, and so on. I think we should concentrate on proposals that make the victim-pool smaller, which is to say, which makes getting an article written and mainspaced as fast and easy and painless as possible. Furthermore, I think that going forward we should make sure that the wp-coi-queue (which you "invented" more or less) is properly staffed, and not recurrently stalled for months, so that good apples following the bright-line-'rule' and other best-practice-recommendates, can achieve their goals insofar as those goals dovetail with wikipedia's goals (adding non-WP:COPYVIO'd wiki-reliably-WP:SOURCEd wiki-neutral factoids to wiki-notable articles in a WP:NICE collaborative editing environment). I also think we should concentrate our defensive efforts on making bad-apple orangemoody editing as financially prohibitive as possible, which means making it cost more than doing it the good-apple disclosed-paid-editor way. Prohibition of undesired behavior never works, historically, as long as the profits to those willing to facilitate the undesired behavior are high, there is incentive for breaking the rules. The key is not knee-jerk "verboten" but rather carefully calculated "hit 'em where it counts" which is in the wallet. Take away their victim-pool, and make the socking and AfC-abuse and nondisclosure more fiscally expensive than the legit-uid wp-coi-queue disclosed-editing alternative, and wikipedia will win.

some thoughts on how to *best* beat hypothetical future orangemoody-imitators

Case in point, I think that when using press-reports that quote anonymous wikipedia insiders, saying inflammatory things about the socks in question, in our article about the orangemoody incident, we have to be very careful about WP:CIRCULAR. Even if there is no real legal risk to wikipedia by using inflammatory legalese to describe the socks as a group, there is a reputational risk, aka the risk that wikipedia-the-brand will "lose face" in the eyes of the public, or even 'merely' in the eyes of the editing public. So I'm advocating that we treat the socks as checkuser-confirmed socks... which is to say 99% certainty... but that we treat ALL other allegations as merely allegations, and stick strictly to the barest and most neutral of factoids, letting the readership make up their own mind, and simply omit the inflammatory language. The long-term risk, in my view, is that future orangemoody imitators will take advantage of the flaws in checkuser (I'd like to be vague about how this might be done), and rope in some innocent editors that LOOK like checkuser-confirmed-bad-apples but are not... a strict policy that wikipedia treats the humans behind the 99%-confirmed socks as committing alleged violations of this or that wiki-policy, and careful avoidance of legalese whenever possible ("the sock violated WP:COPYVIO" is distinct from "the human defendant infringed upon legally copyrighted material which is a prosecutable violation of international law" to give you the flavor of what I prefer versus what I want to avoid... not that we actually use the latter language, but we are too far along the linguistic spectrum methinks). I'm not 100.000% positive that such roping-in-of-fairly-legit-editors did not happen in the orangemoody incident, for at least one case, who shall remain nameless per WP:NPA.

Anyways, if the de facto policy is that we delete all articles of the hypothetical future sockring, and heap linguistic abuse upon the sockring-participating-humans without regard to WP:NICE and WP:NLT, I foresee problems. User:Brianhe sees this as worrying-about-the-spammer, and there is some truth to that: if my policy is implemented, 99% of the time it will 'benefit' the spammer, since calling them a spade, rather than a single-user geomorphological manipulator, is all that Brianhe thinks we ought to be doing. Of course, in my mind it won't hurt *us* to call 'checkuser-confirmed socks' exactly that, as long as we are doing our damnedest to prevent *future* such checkuser-confirmed socks from misusing wikipedia. Outside the question of how to write the Conflict of interest editing of Misplaced Pages article, and spinoff-subsidiaries thereof... somebody, turns out it was User:davidwr, added a hatnote linking the orangemoody article to the checkuser-evidence-page for instance which I think is just *really* the wrong direction to be trending if we want to avoid the Eye Of The Navel... there are also legitimate disagreements about how to best defend the 'pedia against future orangemoody-imitators, and vaguely similar hypothetical future incidents.

There are plenty of proposals to force disclosures of various types (sometimes only for a subset of articles at first aka the usual slippery slope), plenty of proposals to implement super-WP:42 wiki-notability requirements (again but more often a slippery slope is explicitly proposed e.g. only BLP or only corp or whatever). There are also specific proposals about how to lock down AfC, and so on. I think we should concentrate on proposals that make the victim-pool smaller, which is to say, which makes getting an article written and mainspaced as fast and easy and painless as possible. Furthermore, I think that going forward we should make sure that the wp-coi-queue (which you "invented" more or less) is properly staffed, and not recurrently stalled for months, so that good apples following the bright-line-'rule' and other best-practice-recommendates, can achieve their goals insofar as those goals dovetail with wikipedia's goals (adding non-WP:COPYVIO'd wiki-reliably-WP:SOURCEd wiki-neutral factoids to wiki-notable articles in a WP:NICE collaborative editing environment). I also think we should concentrate our defensive efforts on making *bad*-apple orangemoody editing as financially prohibitive as possible, which means making it cost more than doing it the good-apple disclosed-paid-editor way. Prohibition of undesired behavior never works, historically, as long as the profits to those willing to facilitate the undesired behavior are high, there is incentive for breaking the rules. The key is not knee-jerk "verboten" but rather carefully calculated "hit 'em where it counts" which is in the wallet. Take away their victim-pool, and make the socking and AfC-abuse and nondisclosure more fiscally expensive than the legit-uid wp-coi-queue disclosed-editing alternative, and wikipedia will win.

Not sure if you wanted THAT much of an explanation, so I'll go ahead and collapse it into a greenbox. In a nutshell, I think we should be extremely conservative in our choice of words to describe alleged orangemoody sockmaster-humans, since checkuser-tech-data is only 99.4% confirmed and there *are* ways to trick it. Second, I think that the way to beat future orangemoody-imitators is *not* to prohibit good-apple paid editing and bad-apple paid editing, but rather to make the bad-apple type Cost More such that rational bad-apples will prefer to disclose per ToU and use the wp-coi-queue {{edit_request}} and stop socking and so on (the irrational ones will be fewer and easier to block/mitigate). As for your personal situation, I think in some ways (albeit not all), the overall difficulty is not much different from how I view wikipedia's proper orangemoody strategy, specifically this bit:

I see no reason for them to disclose, when there are so many benefits to not doing so. How can I continue to operate a business that promotes ethical practices, if the best advice I can give them is to be covert?

My goal, is to fix the 'pedia so that the best advice is NOT to be covert, in the general case. So the question becomes, then, are you permanently soured on the extant group of wikipedians? Because I cannot agree that a hyperbolic AN/I thread is "the community" here ... as you've been around long enough to know. If you *are* soured on the community as a whole, and AN/I was the just proverbial straw-on-the-camel, even that is not an insurmountable problem -- it is possible to change the community, by bringing in new (or newly-more-active) wiki-blood, and by changing the relevant wiki-policies, and so on. As you've also been around long enough to know, rewriting the WP:PAG will be a total piece of cake. ;-) Or maybe not. But at least theoretically, for the sake of usertalk discussion if not necessarily follow-on actions, do you now truly believe that the 'pedia is rotten to the core, and cannot be salvaged?

Assuming you are NOT permanently soured on wikipedia-qua-wikipedia, the idea of the encyclopedia anybody can edit, embodying the sum of all human knowledge, consisting of neutral just-the-facts information condensed by collaborative amateurs into a libre online thing of beauty... well, then there are some business-models that remain ethical, and do solve your stated problems. Well, at least, by my standards they remain ethical, and by my understanding of your problem-statements (and more WP:CRYSTAL-y by my predictions about the feasibility/viability of my conceptual solutions thereto). But rather than go into details, which may be useless if that bridge is already burned, I ask you: have you permanently decided that wikipedia cannot be saved, and that you must leave whilst you honourably can? Because I agree about that being wikipedia's loss.

p.s. an aside about the pernicious spam-bot possibility, with which I've had some personal experience
Although I cannot rule out that somebody with a wiki-grudge may have added your name to spam-engine listings, I can say this much from personal experience -- a former friend of mine accidentally posted my plaintext email address to some obscure but web-visible-archived mailing-list she was participating in... not out of malice but when she somehow managed to click the "reply-to-all-people-in-my-own-email-address-book" sequence of buttons at three in the morning ... sigh ... and within a month that email-address of mine was utterly unusable due to the automated spam-crawlers. And I expect the same was true of the other three hundred fifty people she had in her contact-list. Sheesh! Point being, once your email address is on wikipedia, or maybe even linked to from a wikipedia userpage, there is a non-negligible possibility that you might be spam-crawled, by a bot. I'm not sure what technology prowess the spammers have nowadays, but they are NOT dwindling away; I have a wiki-buddy who testified to the FTC in 2004/2005 when the CAN-SPAM Act was being fiddled with, and since then things have not improved. Stopping orangemoody-type-breaches is much easier than stopping regular-old-spammer-type-breaches, incidentally, because merely by one of their ten thousand spam-prose-messages getting viewed the spammer will break even; the complexity of the orangemoody mechanisms were a testament to wikipedia's resilience at keeping 'normal' spambots and spam-meatpuppets out of mainspace, in fact. But email is not wikipedia. One of the reasons that I'm okay with revealing my computer's IP address is that it isn't tied to an email address, and cannot be spammed. Pseudonymity slash anonymity are a very serious topic, methinks, and wikipedia is one of the few places where it really matters in a tangible fashion. I mostly edit political articles, for instance, and some of them are not very collegial when the election-cycle heats up.

p.s. an aside about the pernicious spam-bot possibility, with which I've had some personal experience

Although I cannot rule out that somebody with a wiki-grudge may have added your name to spam-engine listings, I can say this much from personal experience -- a former friend of mine accidentally posted my plaintext email address to some obscure but web-visible-archived mailing-list she was participating in... not out of malice but when she somehow managed to click the "reply-to-all-people-in-my-own-email-address-book" sequence of buttons at three in the morning ... sigh ... and within a month that email-address of mine was utterly unusable due to the automated spam-crawlers. And I expect the same was true of the *other* three hundred fifty people she had in her contact-list. Sheesh! Point being, once your email address is on wikipedia, or maybe even *linked* to from a wikipedia userpage, there is a non-negligible possibility that you might be spam-crawled, by a bot. I'm not sure what technology prowess the spammers have nowadays, but they are NOT dwindling away; I have a wiki-buddy who testified to the FTC in 2004/2005 when the CAN-SPAM Act was being fiddled with, and since then things have not improved. Stopping orangemoody-type-breaches is much easier than stopping regular-old-spammer-type-breaches, incidentally, because merely by one of their ten thousand spam-prose-messages getting *viewed* the spammer will break even; the complexity of the orangemoody mechanisms were a testament to wikipedia's resilience at keeping 'normal' spambots and spam-meatpuppets out of mainspace, in fact. But email is not wikipedia. One of the reasons that I'm okay with revealing my computer's IP address is that it *isn't* tied to an email address, and cannot be spammed. Pseudonymity slash anonymity are a very serious topic, methinks, and wikipedia is one of the few places where it *really* matters in a tangible fashion. I mostly edit political articles, for instance, and some of them are not very collegial when the election-cycle heats up.

p.p.s. If you prefer to reply inline, to the various facets, please feel free to "chunk up" my talkpage-posting by sprinkling my sig into the appropriate places, so you have a place to indent beneath the newly-inserted sigs, or just by jumping into the middle as needed (I'll sprinkle my own sig as appropriate). Best, 75.108.94.227 (talk) 22:20, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

75.108, this is good thoughtful material. "Rotten to its core" is a bit of hyperbole, but I do feel the site's founding principles slipping away. Nowadays there are a lot of cases where editors are bullied into disclosing their relationship to a BLP, who is only a distant acquaintance, or disclosing their profession, then accused of having a COI on that basis. I still believe that anonymous editing keeps the focus on contents, rather than editors, and the more an editor discloses about themselves, the more "hooks" they offer for personal attacks on the basis of who they are or their motivations for editing. Paid editing is an exception where we need enough of a disclosure to avoid deceit.

My retiring from volunteer editing is more simplistic. I've experienced off-wiki harassment before and I've edited an article where I was told the company was trying to dox and sue me, but couldn't figure out who I was. Being anonymous is what protects users from this kind of thing and I'm just not willing to continue editing without the protection anonymity offers.

Aspiring to improve things is an idealistic stance. I generally don't edit any policy pages and most discussions I have seen are not very thoughtful, organized, etc.. I have a hard time imagining a thoughtful discussion about a slightly modified version of the TOU and from what I've seen WP:COI has just gotten more convoluted and worse over time.

Also, the true source of so much hostility and conspiracy speculation is the very large number of cases where such behavior is actually warranted. The astroturfing firms that are getting increasingly clever in hiding their financial connection make it increasingly difficult for Wikipedians to know who is a regular volunteer and who is actually a covert meatpuppet of a commercial interest. This leads to a sort of justified paranoia and a contentious environment on Misplaced Pages, both for paid editors and anyone who happens to add positive information about a company. It creates editors so frustrated with corporations that they take anti-corporate stances in content and participation. I am actually working on something that could make substantial impact, but I don't really feel the Misplaced Pages community itself is equipped to have thoughtful, progressive discussion that leads to meaningful decisions and actions. David King, Ethical Wiki (Talk) 00:16, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

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Misplaced Pages:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Acupuncture case request closed by motion

The Arbitration Committee has closed a case request by motion with the following remedy being enacted:

In lieu of a full case, the Arbitration Committee authorises standard discretionary sanctions for any edit about, and for all pages relating to Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Any sanctions that may be imposed should be logged at Misplaced Pages:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Acupuncture. The Committee urges interested editors to pursue alternative means of dispute resolution such as RFC's or requests for mediation on the underlying issues. If necessary, further requests concerning this matter should be filed at the requests for clarification and amendment page.

QuackGuru (talk) 00:09, 16 September 2015 (UTC)