"
Can you please try to see the glass being half full instead of half empty.  I'm certainly not trying to do anything that you or others would see as ""problematic"".  Five weeks ago I was getting involved in wikipedia and I was feeling enthusiastic, so I posted something to some user groups (reaching 10,000+ members), encouraging them to contribute to wikipedia.  I thought, at the time, that long-time wikipedia people would be more welcoming of new people, and that wikipedians would be happy that I encouraged others to participate.  I was not trying to target and encourage employees of a commercial product to contribute.  The groups I posted to were user groups, not employee groups.  But yes, I guess that some employees belong to these groups as well.  And my comment about Hill using the talk page was simply to comment that my personal POV is that he found a good way for someone with COI to contribute. 

I feel that the negative and accusing tone of your last sentence is unwarranted. It is un-welcoming comments like that that drive away new wikipedia contributors.  I see my wikipedia contributions as a way of giving unselfishly to the world, trying to spread knowledge and improve understanding.  I think that even if I only have time to make a small number of contributions, I feel I am helping, and that this should be the spirit of wikipedia.  So seeing your criticism that I am not making enough edits to non-commercial products is just frustrating and disheartening to me.
I hate feeling that I have to defend my reputation here, and I don't agree with you that editing non-commercial pages should improve anyone's appearance of trustworthiness.  However, your claim that I am only editing the wikipedia entries of ""these commercial products"" is also just incorrect.  I don't know if there is a way to view the wikipedia contributions of others, but if there is, you would see that I've been making edits to many non-commercial pages, including CRISP-DM, Data mining, the journal Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, Predictive analytics, Statistics, Customer retention, Predictive Model Markup Language, Anomaly detection, SEMMA, Machine learning, Jacques Cousteau, SIGKDD, Decision tree learning.  Sometimes I'm making simple formatting edits, and sometimes I'm spending hours trying to track down the right references to put on the CRISP-DM page.  Yes, my edits are mostly in the general area of data mining, because that is where I have the greatest interest and knowledge.  Similarly, when I guest lecture at local universities, I lecture to these types of classes, not due to any collusion, but because that's what I know.

Thanks for listening to my mini-rant.  I know I'm taking this more personally than you probably meant it.  But it bothers me when someone questions that I am not working hard enough or they question my ethics, and that's what your comments feel like.  All I'm asking is that long-established wikipedia people be more welcoming and encouraging, and give new people the benefit of the doubt that they are acting in good faith trying to make meaningful contributions (however small).  New people grow and adjust - but it takes a while to learn the conventions of the wikipedia community.  Please be patient and encouraging to new people.

I'm going to leave this discussion now.  If needed, I will return to it after the holiday season.  But I hope there is no need to.    "