Rexibit

Conflict of interest policy

Welcome to Wikipedia. If you are affiliated with some of the people, places or things you have written about on Wikipedia, you may have a conflict of interest. In keeping with Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy, edits where there is a conflict of interest, or where such a conflict might reasonably be inferred, are strongly discouraged. If you have a conflict of interest, you should avoid or exercise great caution when:

1. editing or creating articles related to you, your organization, or its competitors, as well as projects and products they are involved with;
2. participating in deletion discussions about articles related to your organization or its competitors; and
3. linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see Wikipedia:Spam).

Please familiarize yourself with relevant policies and guidelines, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, verifiability of information, and autobiographies.

For information on how to contribute to Wikipedia when you have a conflict of interest, please see our frequently asked questions for organizations. Thank you.

• matthewwatts.net: Linksearch en - meta - de - fr - simple - wikt:en - wikt:fr • MER-C Cross-wiki • Reports: Links on en - COIBot - COIBot-Local • Discussions: tracked - advanced • COIBot-Local - COIBot-XWiki - Wikipedia: en - fr - de • Google: search • meta • Domain: domaintools • AboutUs.org • Live link: http://www.matthewwatts.net
• rexbit.com: Linksearch en - meta - de - fr - simple - wikt:en - wikt:fr • MER-C Cross-wiki • Reports: Links on en - COIBot - COIBot-Local • Discussions: tracked - advanced • COIBot-Local - COIBot-XWiki - Wikipedia: en - fr - de • Google: search • meta • Domain: domaintools • AboutUs.org • Live link: http://www.rexbit.com

--Ronz (talk) 16:15, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Hello Ronz. I'm not sure why you think it's a conflict of interest. I was writing on a scraping method that wasn't already described, and listed the source that covers it in greater detail. I could be more descriptive in what I was annotating if you think that will help, as looking back on it, I needed to further distinguish it from the DOM parsing method that is already listed (since it's not loading a browser or used client-side).

In addition, there are many other sources that people list as annotations that are blogs or are the sites which sell bots, so that really isn't a good reason to remove content - especially when the page I linked too was written for educational purposes and went into great detail about the method. --(Rexibit (talk) 20:23, 21 December 2010 (UTC))

Thanks for responding. This might be best discussed at WP:COIN, but while we're here...

You're saying you have no conflict of interest with rexibit.com and matthewwatts.net (and totallybleach.com for that matter)? --Ronz (talk) 22:23, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Hello Ronz, thank's for the quick reply, though I do wish you'd have elaborated further in terms of the article in question so that I could have responded better.

In terms of knowledge and reference to scraping data on the web, the article I linked too on my personal blog covers, in depth, using PHP to access the DOM of a document and discusses how to scrape data from it. I was showing a friend today how to update a Wikipedia entry and used an article I wrote as an example. Even so, I'm not trying to promote my site, I was using it as a reference since it is of beneficial use to anyone who would have read the entry and wanted more information. A lot of the other sources give generic information that don't actually help someone.

There are other references in the Wiki article by people who are obviously promoting their products, and they remain. I don't see how an educational article that I referenced is less credible and classed as a conflict of interest than someone's general information on their corporate site. I'll leave it for you to remove them, because me doing so would obviously be a conflict of interest "now".

Rexibit.com is my site, though I am not promoting it here and don't even mention it on my blog, so it's hardly a conflict of interest. I have no affiliation with totallybleach.com since I gave it away awhile back, and it's not even remotely related to web scraping, so I don't know why you brought it up.

--(Rexibit (talk) 23:01, 21 December 2010 (UTC))

Thanks for explaining in detail and having patience with by terseness.

WP:COI describes in general how to approach these situations. Putting aside the coi problems, there's the question of your personal blog meets our reliable source criteria.

Yes, Wikipedia articles and the sources in them vary in quality. Hopefully, they're that way only because they haven't been reviewed yet by someone familiar with the relevant policies/guidelines. --Ronz (talk) 23:57, 21 December 2010 (UTC)