Something that's always puzzled me - why does Wikipedia automatically ban company names as usernames?

Surely it's more transparent to the community to see that "Microsoft PR" has been editing the microsoft article that "Joe Blow" ?

What's the rationale?

Maximal drama value.

No, seriously, the reason for it is that Wikipedia policy requires that conflicts of interest be kept secret. You're welcome to have as many as you like, just keep them to yourself.

It's supposed to be one person to one account.

I can understand that for individuals but role accounts for companies seems perfectly acceptable to me - it's a point of contact to the company as an entity not the individuals who make use the company. That's the entity responsible for the edits. The current system just seems to push COI more underground.

Wikipedia's governing philosophy is aggressively anti-corporatist, mainly because many members of its original core community were communists and attempted to coopt Wikipedia to forward their personal philosophy, so it should come as little surprise that its policies are unfriendly to corporate entities and to businesses generally.

Interesting, I never knew that.

I think the other problem is that many of the editors and administrators who form policy have never worked or been employed in any role higher than bartender/paperboy - mainly because of their age, so the lens they use to form a view on companies is that of TV and corporations are invariably evil in mainstream dramas/popular culture.

GFDL

Someone would need to dig into what GFDL says about "work for hire" but I wonder if that notion is a way around the attribution issue... (the idea being that anything contributed by a role account was being contributed by the corporation, who holds copyright, not the individual author... and to create a role account there would need to be some process to make the corporation legally assert that to the Foundation (offloading the responsibility to the corp) )

Just musing out loud here...

(because I agree that if there were a way to have role accounts, it would be useful

Entirely irrelevant.

If I edit from my IP address without logging in, all anyone can possibly know is that someone from my university is editing. It could be any of literally thousands of people. Yet it's allowed by the GFDL.

Formal corporate role accounts should be no worse from the perspective of GFDL compliance.

Another component is that some administrators are sadistic. Many are younger. Younger people are often used by dictatorships to torture others. The Milgram experiment showed that subjects given a little authority will become abusive. Since there is a rule against corporate names, administrators will blindly be tough and block. Some corporate sounding names that weren't even real names of corporations have been blocked.