This article makes my week. I generally feel we should blank articles more and delete them less, but this is an area where the explicit rebuff of deletion has its advantages. SJ On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 8:41 PM, Durova <nadezhda.durova(a)gmail.com> wrote:

That's right. It isn't that we don't want an article and a skilled PR editor ought to be able to write an article the average editor could not tell was written by a PR person. The clue to bad work is lifting stuff from the company's website. And, of course, the complete absence of any negative information, however notorious. Fred

I think continued monitoring of an article by a skilled PR operative would result in an informative, well-referenced article, which notes, but does not dwell on negative aspects. As noted, such an effort would have to integrated with our usual editing patterns. Here's the question: If you can't tell it's PR, is there anything wrong with it? Fred

On 04/02/2010 12:51 PM, Fred Bauder wrote: Possibly, which is the problem. The main function of PR is to put the best spin on things in a way that everybody accepts that as the truth. By its nature, it's unavoidably POV and COI. Bad PR gets caught doing this; good PR doesn't. Wikipedia has shifted the balance of power some: there are new ways for PR people to get caught, and importing their broadcast-media habits makes them look dumb. But I have every reason to expect that PR people will adapt. Even so I think they'll have a hard time shifting the tone much on articles that get a lot of attention; the room to spin there is small. But for more obscure topics, I think there's plenty of gray area within which they can construct an article that suits their purposes. Purposes that are necessarily different than ours. William

I think we are pretty much in agreement. If there is gray area, it is the PR person's job to maximally exploit that without ever getting caught. It's our job to minimize the gray area. I think the reason people feel that we can generally detect PR spin in the wiki environment is that PR people aren't used to dealing with us. Their habits are mainly tuned for broadcast media and the general public, so their attempts at manipulation often look clumsy and obvious to us. However, it is still early days. The first step will be them learning to stop being obvious jerks, and this article is a fine example of that. But if Wikipedia is actually important to them, they will learn how to play the game like any other skilled POV pusher. And unlike the hobbyist POV pushers we have now, these people will be professionals, ones playing a long game. They'll have a number of advantages, like a steady paycheck and an information asymmetry that strongly favors them. Having watched skilled PR people totally play professional journalists, I'm sure that they'll learn to play us just as well. For us, that will mean appearing earnest, helpful, concerned about a balanced article, etc, etc. It will mean knowing about our policies and culture. It will mean providing useful references, building good articles, and generally being a good citizen. They'll learn how to build trust with us in the same way that they have learned how to build trust with journalists, and then they will use that trust to the benefit of their clients, because that's their job. Like you and DGG, I think their interests and ours coincide about 90% of the time, so I don't have a big problem with that. If they are pros, the good ones won't cause the trouble that blatant POV pushers cause. I just wouldn't want people to forget that PR people are paid POV pushers with an ineradicable conflict of interest, no matter how nice and helpful they learn to become. William On 04/03/2010 07:29 PM, James Alexander wrote:

At 12:00 PM 4/4/2010, William Pietri wrote: Well, that's one kind of PR. This negative view of PR is common, and justified because that's exactly what polticial consultants do and other kinds of PR people who don't trust that the truth is enough to promote their product or position. But if you look at what PR educators teach, it's the opposite. It's taught that if you deceive your audience, there will be a backlash when they find out. Good PR tries to educate the public about the product or cause. It relies on their intelligence, though it must also understand their ignorance and their habits. The kind of PR that has the reputation mentioned is the kind that relies on and exploits ignorance, and prefers ignorance because it seems easier to manipulate, as it often is. A good PR person who finds that his or her employer wants the latter kind of PR will sensibly find another client or job, because it's unstable. Of course, high pay is always tempting.... but that applies to all temptations to lie and cheat in order to make a profit, it's not confined to PR. Except for the sophisticated ones, before which Wikipedia is a piece of cake. I have recently come to look more carefully at the Mantanmoreland case, and what I find is that Wikipedia is *still* being used as a tool in a very-well-financed campaign, quite successfully. I've found the edits, which are blatantly POV, but still stand, because the editor, banned and editing through IP, knows how to frame them so that they will fly under the radar and do their work unnoticed, except by WordBomb and friends, and, for the most part, non-banned editors who recognize the real situation have been banned or are heavily discouraged, because they will be reverted if they try. As they are, even within the last few days. I'm not banned (from this) and I could make the edits, but I know what will happen if I do, even though I have had no involvement in the topic area. I would be banned, based on recent ArbComm opinion about my work. Even though I'd merely be removing material that is contrary to source and contrary to policy. PR content. It's actually fairly clumsy PR, but good enough is good enough. Turns out it takes very little to pull the wool over the eyes of the community. Only the stupid or ignorant PR people get caught.

On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 12:58 AM, Samuel Klein &lt;meta.sj(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: <snip> I'm not sure about bot-seeded and maintained topics. You need to have the human editors to go with that. Having bots doing stuff *without* humans working with them and complementing them, tends to be a recipe for disaster. But I like this idea! Those lists do sort of exist in userspace and in redlinked lists in mainspace, and there are (or was) some systematic listing of such things at "requested articles". Have a look at requested articles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requested_articles Are you suggesting something like that, but maintained by editors who decide which suggestions are notable? I predict edit wars over which links would stay or go on such lists. The only thing more useless than arguing over an existing article at AfD, is arguing over an article that hasn't even been created yet... :-) Or even founding editors of publications like the Times Literary Supplement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Lyttelton_Richmond As one of the sources I looked at said, not a name many have heard of, but a surprising amount of influence. Carcharoth