User:Jeh/coi

COI disclosure

As it says on my home page I work with Windows a lot. This association has been responsible for much of my income since about 1994. And since this is something I know a lot about, I edit in a lot of articles about various aspects of Windows and related hardware and software.

Employees of Microsoft, of Intel, of AMD, and of a great many other manufacturers of Windows-related hardware... and, of course, a larger number of developers, system administrators, and users of Windows machines... have been attendees in seminars I've presented. I do not regard these as "close connections" (which would require placement of the {{Connected contributor}} template on the talk page of any article I edit) because these are extremely transient relationships, they are not directly with me, and there are so many different ones. I'm not a full- or part-time employee of any of these companies, and none of them have been the subject (article title) of WP articles I've edited - though that could be seen as splitting hairs. So let's be clear: The articles I've edited do often cover products of those companies, notably, of course, Microsoft, Intel, and AMD. But I have no stake in those products' sales.

I do have direct consulting clients, but none of them or their products have been the subject of Wikipedia articles I've edited. I most certainly have never been paid to edit Wikipedia.

Nevertheless, if any of my contributions seem to show bias toward any of the above-mentioned companies, let alone any other problems, please bring them to my attention on the relevant article's talk page. I believe I am watching every article I've edited to any significant degree, certainly all of those where COI could be an issue. If I don't respond in a few days, feel free to use {{ping}} or similar.

n.b.: I'm not promising to agree with your assessment. And if you're not happy with the result of that process, you can of course post a report to the relevant administrators' noticeboard. (Don't forget to notify me of the report.)

But do be specific. For each such example, you should at minimum describe why you think it shows bias (or whatever problem), referring to the relevant WP policies and guidelines. For example, please do not make me ask "uh, bias against what?"

A really good way to describe perceived "bias" would be to suggest an alternate wording or presentation that would remove the problem you perceive.

As with all discussions of article content, this should take place on the article talk page; then everyone who's following the talk page can see your post and evaluate your issue.

Armwaves like "your editing history shows a pattern of bias" or "... of COI" or "...of deliberately misleading statements" are going to get very little attention and no response beyond "please be more specific".

Please also see WP:Casting aspersions.

It may well be that you feel I've given insufficient attention to some other operating system or hardware platform. Fine - add what you perceive as the missing information (with, of course, good references). If I didn't do that it's likely because I'm not qualified to do that. If we required every Wikipedia editor to be competent in all possible sub-topics of an article very little would ever get written here.

Also re the above, if you're at all good with a search engine, I'm fairly easy to find IRL. I deliberately chose my nickname for that; I'm not trying to hide. On the other hand I did not use my full name as my login name here because I didn't want to be accused of attempts to get my name all over WP (and similarly for the names of any companies with which I'm associated).

Posting of any editor's personally identifying information on Wikipedia, no matter how apparent or easy you think it was to find, is nevertheless strongly forbidden by WP:OUTING; the same policy notes that threats to do such constitute personal attacks and will be dealt with accordingly.|

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