Talk:William Shaner

COI template

I understand why the template was introduced here as there were a handful of edits by a user called User:COShaner which does indicate a close connection to the subject of the article and this user may actually be William Shaner himself. But having looked into these edits and into the COI templete guidelines at Template:COI, I wonder if this template is really necessary here. None of the edits - which also were quite small - brought in any POV or bias but they added neutral and factual information. The templates warns that "cleanup to comply with Wikipedia's content policies, particularly neutral point of view" may be required, but this is obviously not the case here. The guidelines state: "Do not apply this tag simply because you suspect COI editing, or because there is or was a COI editor" and "This tag may be removed by editors who do not have a conflict of interest ... if the problem is not explained on the article's talk page". The template was added by User:C.Fred so maybe we can have a discussion here as to the rationale of the template in this case. If this is only about informing people that there is an editor with a close connection to the subject, I'd be fine with that but I think this can also be achieved by mentioning this fact here on the talk page. If the rationale is that COShaner's edits show bias or POV, then this bias/POV should be clearly identified; maybe I missed it. But if there is such a bias, any such formulations may easily be edited out and I also want to point out that the last edit of COShaner here was in 2021 so the chance he might add some bias now or in the future looks pretty remote to me. Proofreader (talk) 14:44, 11 December 2024 (UTC)