User talk:Usr 681ab43c-99d7-4e40-92ba-956d9d8d66e7/sandbox

This draft is flawed for Community Content

We have had a discussion regarding this since last week, as well as the 50 minute discussion on the check-in meeting. There was big resistance regarding your restrictive policies for the Community Section of this wiki. I would like to preface that I agree the official part benefiting from your very stringent wiki expertise. Unfortunately applying this for the Community section would essentially make it dead on arrival. Therefore I took your COI draft and took a deep dive on why it is flawed.

• Editors with a COI, including paid editors, are expected to disclose it whenever they seek to change an affected article's content.
• you should disclose your COI when involved with affected articles;

On Community Pages your interpretation of a conflict would be implied inherently, as it describes content generated by the community that is part of what the page is, in short you wont have meaningful Community pages without the actual team of its Creators.

• COI editors are strongly discouraged from editing affected articles directly(...)
• you are strongly discouraged from editing affected articles directly;

This line kills the entire Community section of the wiki. I will break it down for each Community Category we have currently: Community Worlds: A World page will simply not exist in a meaningful way without the actual creator giving fundamental input that literally only the World creator can provide. This can be Design decision or technicals and even down to part of its history. Further on a pure motivational scale, you will not see anyone make world articles for anything but the top worlds. You are lucky if you even get double digit amounts with this kind of restriction. No one is going to go sit there, spend their time talking about some World, they have no relation to, its just not feasible. It also leads to dangerous assumptions in an effort to fill a page with something or worse people coming up with borderline fan fiction. Community Guides: The existence of a Guide implies that the Guide creator has developed a way to solve something. The process then got written down to be digestible to teach others. For advanced Guides especially this inherently ties the Guide Creator to the Guide written. There is a point, where you have to get a bit specific to bring your message across. This line would make most Guides impossible to serve here, as many Guides are born from necessity in something. Community Resources: If you don't allow the Creator of a Resource to make the article, then you may as well scrap the whole category. No one is going to make an article for a Community Resource without any impetus to actually do it. This is even more extreme than with Worlds, because many Resources are not as well known as the Worlds they are used in or used for are. You basically have to have the mercy of a Creator to not only share their Resource there, but then also go out of their way to describe it for the wiki or have anyone associated with it to do so. Otherwise all you get is a 1 liner of someone who randomly found the resource and links it in the wiki. And with no meaningful Resource pages, this section is useless to be used to learn.

• (...)and can propose changes on article talk pages instead.
• you should propose changes on talk pages, or by posting a note at the COI noticeboard, (...)

This is a non-solution, because you need to find someone to actually adopt it to a page, which is unlikely. I would also again mention here, as previously was in our discussion linked above. You will simply just ask a friend who is trusted to copy paste your stuff into the page. You think it wont happen, you think you can catch it, but you wont. Same as people get away with evading bans with alt accounts you will simply not be able to enforce this. This means only those jaded enough benefit from having their Community page seen and not the majority with good intentions.

Which brings me to:

• Someone having a conflict of interest is a description of a situation, not a judgment about that person's opinions, integrity, or good faith.

This line itself is sensible, however your thought process breaks down into 2 crucial points. 1. You assume that anyone who dares to participate in a Community Article and in their creation is inherently malicious, because anyone sensible would understand this Conflict of Interest and would never dare to touch it in the first place. 2. You assume that people actually bother to reverse-engineer knowledge applied to a Community World or Community Resources to write an Article about them when they have never had anything to do with them. This is also why barring Creators from participation just kills the whole Community section.

• However, our policy on matters relating to living people allows very obvious errors to be fixed quickly, including by the subject.

This should not only apply to living people, but to anything posted to the Community Wiki. Instead of barring the prime source, subject Community pages to the same scrutiny as official ones when it comes to accuracy. Just because you make a wiki article on say a Resource you created, does not mean you "own" the page. It remains open to any other contributor to correct and edit. There is no way 1 person can go against hundreds of fact checkers as swarm intelligence. This is how content can get peer-reviewed, not through some talk page and endless stalling.

you should not act as a reviewer of affected article(s) if there is any dispute on its content; no contest, because it is not the Creators place to deceive in the first place, all editors play on the same level.

Something I have not touched up on above is the implication, that by relying on a talk page to have a Creator supply information you put a page's creation at another Editors mercy. How do you think this would play out in a real scenario? First an editor needs to reach that new talk page in its backlog, take the information in and start writing an article about it. This already is prohibitive and puts a lot of work onto someone who is not even that motivated to write about it. It is such a thankless job, there will likely only be a handful of people actually bothering to do so. This means you end up giving creative control to a handful of people who can go decide whose Creator's talk page requests they actually like to turn into a Community page. I would argue this is far worse than having to clean up some overly biased Article every now and then, that come from a large number of different people. Of course above assumes, there is no one who just asks their friend to paste an article in for them, to bypass this oligarchy of masochism.