From MozillaZine Knowledge Base

Wsm (Wayne Merry) deleted the bulk of this article. Its inappropriate to make major/controversial changes in an article written by somebody else without discussing it in the discussion page first. Especially when they're made by a well known Mozilla Messaging QA volunteer who leads many QA events and has even filled in for the QA lead (an employee) when he's on vacation.

This is an independent user community. While we welcome contributions from anybody, Mozilla Messaging employees and volunteers are expected to be very sensitive to the appearance of any conflict of interest. I rolled back the article to restore the deletions, merging a few minor edits that had also been made. Tanstaafl 11:42, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

You have jumped _unnecessarily_ to a bad conclusion. CLEARLY, if one takes a looks at my comments in the history http://kb.mozillazine.org/index.php?title=Thunderbird_3.0_installation_issues&action=history and at the change in context with the rest of the article, it's easy to conclude the content deletion was unintentional. That's what happened and I have no idea how it got deleted. I have no idea what "conflict of interest" you are referring to, nor if there was, what the importance of such a conflict means. Furthermore, I don't see now my purely volunteer work in any venue outside of mozillazine in any way invalidates me or makes me less welcome from participating on mozillazine. What's the issue? Why smear someone? Wsm 12:21, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

I'm sorry it came across as a smear (I thought for a long time whether to say anything), but it was a combination of a couple of things.

1. I did read the history beforehand. The deletion looked too clean (right at the end of the "major" section, it didn't lose even a sentence) to be accidental. It also seemed unlikely given how experienced you are. Frankly, this ticked me off. I felt betrayed. Especially as I discovered this while merging your sticky thread, which I had been careful to ask beforehand if it was okay if I did that.

2. You are held to a different standard because you are the face of QA as far as many people are concerned. You are not only welcome but encouraged to participate, but its a sensitive issue. You might not be aware of the arguments about whether authors of add-ons can write KB articles about them, which caused some editors to push for banning all articles about add-ons due to potential conflict of interest.

3. My judgement wasn't good, I've been up for about 36 hours. I should have just sent you an email asking for an explanation. I apologize. Tanstaafl 14:54, 11 October 2010 (UTC)