An essay prompted by recent debate at Wikipedia:Conflict of interest, now a unified guideline set on the topic.
We may be in for a 'third wave' of policy discussion, where the first (dying down when I arrived) was on neutrality, and the second has been the big drive on verifiability, sources and original research.
I'm writing here about conflict of interest (COI) from the particular perspective of an active member of the Arbitration Committee (AC). Please put comments on the Talk page.