Talk:Thomas G. Thibodeau

Addressing Potential COI Concerns

I am addressing potential concerns on COI. My expertise. My contributions are based on my expertise in academic research as a Subject Matter Expert. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject-matter_expert I’m a leading business scholar and a generalist who is asked to provide my perspective in many academic settings. I am, for example, one of five scholars in the world who are Fellows of the Association for Consumer Research, the American Marketing Association, and the American Psychological Association’s Society for Consumer Psychology. And I have served on the faculties of leading business schools of the world, and therefore have broad knowledge of business scholarship. My motives. I, like many others, are trying to create and contribute to help build an encyclopedia. My contributions are related to business research, and my edits and additions have all highlighted the significant and meaningful contributions of researchers from a variety of backgrounds relevant to business academia and society as a whole. I am not a promotions person writing about a book. I am not a company and I am not a single purpose editor. My path to writing the articles in question began when, as a user, I searched Wikipedia for some quick reference related to something I wanted to share with a non-expert. I consistently discovered that Wikipedia articles were wrong in my view in various ways, or inexpert. I began by adding my contributions to those articles. In the course of doing that, I also saw that there were Wikipedia stub pages on various business scholars whose work I knew, but no pages on other equally prominent and important scholars. So my increasing engagement with writing and editing Wikipedia articles is based on a genuine desire to be a part of the solution -- much in the same way as I agree to be on editorial boards, to write promotion and tenure reviews, to organize academic-practitioner conferences. I get zero compensation for my contributions and my motives are public service. Conflict of interest. I understand the high level concerns about conflict of interest, but the tension here is that the people most expert are in the same field. In my case, I am writing about topics where I am highly knowledgeable. Too many articles in Wikipedia related to my field do not read as if a true expert wrote them. I say nothing that is not 100% factual. As a relative Wikipedia novice, however, I am still learning about issues that are causing flags. The need to demonstrate that a scholar is noteworthy is leading me to add content about awards received for work. That in turn is getting flags for the article being perceived as promotional. I am trying (unsuccessfully) to strike a balance between a) adding content to allow a non-expert in the field to conclude that the work is truly noteworthy, b) avoiding any perception that I am “puffing” the significance of work by giving factual citations to external recognition, and c) adding useful wikipedia content for readers -- my reason for doing this in the first place. My inexperience in balancing a) and b) for the Wikipedia editing community may be getting in the way of my achieving c). JglynchatCU (talk) 18:52, 2 December 2020 (UTC)