I'm a bit surprised to see the Rachel Johnson problem being described as a "minor mistake", and that Johnson's own coverage of the issue wasn't mentioned. The mistake she removed included vandalism claiming that she had never completed her degree. She also made some other innocuous updates, [1], but the vandalism that was a genuine problem, and had sat in the article for over a month. [2]. It wasn't corrected until five days later, when an IP used Johnson's article as the source. [3] OrangeMike erred in reinserting the vandalism, and using a templated warning that wasn't really appropriate on her talk page. While Johnson's edits weren't fully in keeping with the COI policy, and thus warranted a talk page message, they were NPOV, and removing vandalism is specifically permitted under the policy. - Bilby (talk) 04:51, 16 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks Bilby, I had the same suspicion when I read that snippet and was about to dig into the diffs and now see your clarification - thanks for posting! I am also very keen to see the content of that "templated warning" and specifically, I would like to know if it directs such users to our "ombudsman" or some other venue where they can post their request for corrections. It's not fair that only people who have a public forum are able to force "Wikipedia" to move, and that others not so fortunate to be able to air their grief in a public arena must wait patiently for weeks, months or years until their "talk page message" is read and acted upon. Jane (talk) 06:18, 16 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The warning is here. The difficulty is that it is mostly a warning against creating an autobiography, which doesn't apply. About half way through it mentions suggesting changes on a talk page, which is the only point that was relevant. The problem is that the standard warning for biographical COI edits seems to be directed at creating pages, rather than making edits. This is one of those cases where a personal comment would have been more useful than the template, because the template is too generic. - Bilby (talk) 06:32, 16 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for that too! Though I can sympathize with Orange Mike's desire to use a template for such COI violations as personal messages take much more energy when on recent-edit-patrol, I do think that such a template should go to some basic COI landing page where the user can look up where to go for help. I noticed for example, that the term "talk page" isn't even explained in that template. Jane (talk) 09:05, 16 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
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