Talk:Reed College/Jan06 Edit War

message: This is a section of the main talk page started on 13 january 2006 and moved here on 19 January 2006. It's not intended to be an archive, so feel free to contribute if you desire. -- Gnetwerker 06:42, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

message: I'm not sure why you put the words "primarily responsible" in quotes. My suggestion is and was that you may have, for example, a fiduciary responsibility to Reed College and, as such, a duty to recuse yourself from this page. Obviously, you are not in and of yourself Reed College, such that your comments could not be strictly speaking considered "autobiography." And yet, the WP policy I quoted remains:  "...editing an article about...  your business, your publications, or any of your own achievements is strongly discouraged." No one person can be said to "own" Reed and therefore no one person can be accused of promoting his or her own business by boosting Reed in this article. But if, for example, a member of the Board at IBM were to make changes to the IBM article, that would be a violation of WP policy. My suspicion is that this is an analogous case. Although I believe I know who you are I do not wish to name you as 1) you have a right to remain anonymous on these pages and 2) I could be quite wrong about your identity and therefore I would not be inclined to insist on your identifying yourself. However, I ask that you stipulate that you have no financial or fiduciary responsibility for the well-being of Reed College, as that is a clear conflict of interest. If you can honestly do that, I withdraw my request for your recusal. IronDuke 02:28, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I put the phrase "primarily responsible" in quotes because it is the phrase that appears in the WP policy statement. Reed is not my business and this is not an autoiography. Other than that, I do not accept your interpretation of the guidelines, and will not rise to your bait.  Reed has 1300 or so students, tens of thousands of alumni and parents, 200 or more faculty and staff, roughly 40 Trustees, and thousands of substantial donors.  Which of them, in your opinion, should be constrained from participation here, and in which class are you?  -- Gnetwerker 07:12, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I had no intention of baiting you. I indicated above what the parameters for participating in the editing of this page were, as per the Wikipedia guidelines. I am taking your refusal to deny that you have a financial/fiduciary relationship with the college as an admission that you do. As for my own connection or lack thereof with Reed, I assure you that I have no such relationship. IronDuke 23:28, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

text: Let me add this: I may be in error in my interpretation of the WP policies. Perhaps a way to resolve this might be to seek mediation on the specific issue of whether, for example, trustees may edit articles on institutions they are members of. Is this acceptable to you? IronDuke 23:34, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

text: I think you should strive to correct or reinforce your understanding of the policy before we undertake anything as heavyweight as mediation.  Why don't you post on the discussion page for the policy?  My refusal to tell you my relationship with Reed should not be interpreted to mean that I have any particular relationship.  As a matter of law, as it turns out, college  board members are not always fiduciaries for their institutions, so this in and of itself may not even be dispositive. -- Gnetwerker 01:42, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not altogether certain how you mean for me to correct my understanding of policy. Posting on the discussion page would not, I think, be a fruitful way to solve the issues that have arisen between us. Perhaps I can simplify my point a bit here: I, myself, have no interest in seeing Reed succeed, nor do I have any interest in seeing Reed fail. Can you say the same? I have no desire to see "positive" or "negative" facts about Reed included in this article, merely notable facts. My suspicion is that you are too close to the institution to edit in a NPOV manner, but I may be wrong in this. I invite you, again, to mediate this dispute with me. IronDuke 02:35, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Recusal 

message: Made a pass over the article and tried to weed out the more transparent examples of POV. There were many, so I'm not going to write about each one but summarize and say that the article looked an awful lot like a brochure for Reed. Many of the comments were entirely unsourced, and some of them would not be appropriate even if they were. If anyone has a problem with any of one of those edits, I'd be glad to get specific. IronDuke 02:50, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Your edit was improper. I had thought that even though you and I appear to disagree on the emphases that are appropriate to place in this article, that together we were actually improving this section, adding sourced and verifiable information. I had left a few things in the section that you had added even though I was uncomfortable with them, even though I believe you ought not to be editing this article at all, as a way of trying to compromise. If you believe the drug section should be removed, perhaps an RfC would be in order. IronDuke 23:22, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

text: The edit was completely proper.  I invited you to discuss your concerns on this Talk page before editing a document that has been largely stable for months.  Your edits have been uniformly POV and also not Verifiable, and this one is no exception.  I have removed the unverifiable comments and retained those supported by specific citations.  The fact that you retained some well-sourced facts that I added only to ameliorate your POV doesn't make it any better.  If you want to stop editing and have a discussion here, relying on concensus to determine the outcome, then please do so and stop editing -- that is the Wiki way. In the meantime I will remove any statement that violates WP:V -- Gnetwerker 02:12, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think we're on the right track again. Let's see what we can do to provide relevant, cited information in the drug use section. Although I think we can work together on this, again, I would ask that you not edit the article directly, but simply post suggestions on the talk page. If I am wrong about you, and you have no stake in Reed, please accept my apology in advance for insinuating that you did. IronDuke 02:41, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I would ask that you not edit the article, especially to remove sourced, relevant information balancing your own POV (which is well-recorded here on these pages).  Anyone who makes the claim "heroin deaths at Reed are not uncommon" has a clear POV (see results of my research below).  However, I will refrain from further edits if (and only if) you will. -- Gnetwerker 05:47, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

text: I suppose locking down the page is a reasonable short term step. I'm not sure what it is that we have to work out from your perspective, but I can tell you mine. There are three issues: 1) Your relationship with Reed, which you refuse to divulge. This relationship does not mean that I think, for example, you would be inclined to lie about Reed. I'd liken it, rather, to a doctor diagnosing himself. They are certainly capable of doing so, but are instead supposed to rely on other doctors to diagnose them. 2) You seem to have a problem with the drug section in general. This makes me question how dedicated you are to providing a fully-sourced, verifiable, non-argumentative section (and when I say "argumentative, I mean adding in your own thoughts about Reed's drug use/binge drinking in relation to other colleges. It is akin to writing, "Yeah, sure there are drugs at Reed. There are drugs everywhere. What are you gonna do?") Your multiple edits of the section, then wholesale deletion of the section, are troubling. 3) Tone of talk comments. You have improved greatly in this area over the past few days, and I appreciate it. I hope you (and I) continue in this vein. IronDuke 15:15, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  NPOV