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by oefrha 2376 days ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Apache_Arrow

> REVIEWERS: Please note that the submitting editor is the chief marketing officer and vice president of strategy at this company.

Yeah, sorry, big no no there.

Disclosure: consider myself a Wikipedian to some extent, got a couple hundred edits on Wikipedia.

2 comments

As long as you abide by WP:N, WP:NOR and WP:NPOV, writing articles about yourself is perfectly acceptable on Wikipedia and doesn't break the rules.
You may want to review https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest. Acceptable — sure, sometimes. Perfectly — no. It’s a strongly discouraged practice.
It's strongly discouraged and looked down upon. Editors with a conflict of interest take up a disproportionate amount of other editors' time and are practically never able to write neutrally about themselves or their company.
This is wrong though, Apache Arrow is an open source spec, the fact that they happen to work at a company working on it seems secondary.
1. Conflict of interest has nothing to do with whether it’s open source. If I submit a Wikipedia article about my completely uncommercial personal project it’s still a huge conflict of interest. Rule of thumb: don’t submit Wikipedia articles about yourself, your project, your employer or your employer’s project. If it’s notable enough eventually someone without a conflict of interest will do it.

2. Tons of companies use open source for marketing. This one is no different as far as I can tell. Even had the chief marketing officer submit a Wikipedia article for their project.

But it's not _their_ project, it's a project they contribute to. Google contributing an article about k8s would be a completely different thing from Google contributing an article on say Hadoop.
> it's a project they contribute to.

One hell of an understatement. Search for Apache Arrow and look at the top results.

Of the ten results on the first mobile search results page for me only two (result 3 & 4) seem related to the company?
The problem with these rules are, that they are so selectively enforced, it is a farce. They selectively assume bad faith, where, by all objective means is none, and brush over others, as long as it is backed up by random arguably non-neutral publications.

It's near impossible to put article's up over prolific female journalist for example, because all this can be enforced since, the publications are all from the same source (the publisher they work for) or are interviews or some sort of talk or award, where it's almost never for men, which get away* by linking to a podcast.

tldr: *WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS