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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Levanteditor (talk | contribs) at 20:01, 23 May 2009. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Hello Levanteditor. Before you blanked your talk page, you asked me why I tagged it with a conflict of interest warning. Your question was:

Hello Sir: My question is that, what do you mean I have a conflict of interest? Sorry if my question bothered you. 77.245.3.99 (talk) 4:56 pm, 16 May 2009, last Saturday (3 days ago) (UTC−5)

It's no bother at all and quite a legitimate thing to ask. So, even though your question no longer appears in the current version of your talk page, I owe you this reply.

In the interest of context, I actually posted two warnings, one for Transtek and the other for Abdulsalam Haykal. Correspondingly, I also marked each article with {{COI}} tags that refer to apparent conflicts by both yourself and User:Nora abazed (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs).

In several of your substantive contributions, you write material that could only be known by someone who is close to each of these subjects. By "close", I mean having knowledge that would not be found in an independent, verifiable and reliable source or known commonly. For example, look at the opening sentence in this version. (What source published the locale of origin of the subject's ancestors?) Contributors having such proximity to a subject – especially a living person – are invariably troubled by Misplaced Pages's requirement for neutrality and objectivity. Contributions to an article about a living person by the subject himself are discouraged in the strongest terms.

Your account's first act in 2008 – 50 minutes after it was established – was to create the article about Mr. Haykal. Since then, essentially all of your account activity has been in pursuit of Mr. Haykal's direct and indirect interests: Transtek, Forward Magazine, American University of Beirut. Recent edit activity has included more of his indirect interests, such as categorizing WEF YGL honorees, of which he is one. Evaluating actions only and not intent, your single-purpose account projects aspects of Mr. Haykal's life onto Misplaced Pages.

When these issues are viewed together, alongside your comment about interviewing Mr. Haykal (regarding which, see WP:NOR), your contributions create a vivid appearance of conflict. I'm happy to debate this with you if you'd like, yet it's hard to imagine a contrary position that would pass the duck test. In my experience, an account prosecutes a contribution agenda such as yours only if its owner has a personal or professional interest in the content it's creating.

Given that you and User:Nora abazed are the primary authors of these two articles, it's appropriate that the {{COI}} article tags remain in place.

If you'd like to take this discussion to the articles' talk pages or to the conflict-of-interest noticeboard and solicit comments from the editorial community-at-large, I'd be happy to do so. Perhaps others who are watching this talk page will comment here.

Finally, in case I haven't said this: assuming that the articles' contents are factually correct and verifiable, I do believe that both Transtek and Mr. Haykal possess sufficient notability to warrant inclusion. The process by which they're constructed, however, is as important as its result.

I remain happy to discuss this further if you'd like; just leave a note below and I'll see it. Regards, Jim Ward 16:44, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for the clarification. I think your concern is ligitimate, however, it's a little too far fetched. There are endless sources on Haykal in Arabic, a language I can read and write. I suggest you flag the entry for deletion as this is better than flagging it as conflict of interest material. Otherwise, you can do your own research and edit the article accordingly. Best regards, Tom Levanteditor (talk) 20:01, 23 May 2009 (UTC)