On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 10:17 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 29 March 2012 09:57, Thomas Morton morton.thomas@googlemail.com wrote:
One of those would be me :) A suggestion I picked up on was to have a joint session with Wikipedians
&
individuals from CREWE where we could have an actual dialogue (I sent an email to Daria about getting assistance for this last night). If your interested in helping out with the dialogue that would rock :)
I've just blogged about this too:
http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2012/03/29/the-public-relations-agency-proble...
I'm hoping that will circulate slightly in the PR sphere.
Very good post. In particular, two observations stand out:
"sometimes our articles are in fact rubbish. How do you fix that?"
"my comments are strictly advisory and based on watching the press absolutely crucify PR people who have edited clients’ articles, which becomes bad PR for the client — even if what they did was within Wikipedia rules and they arguably didn’t deserve it. I’ve been repeatedly amazed at just how upset the press and the public (e.g., people I talk to) get about this, much more than the actual Wikipedians do."
I've been amazed at this as well. Papers will say "so-and-so deleted negative material from their own Wikipedia biography", and that's it. Crime of the century!
In these reports, there's not a peep about what kind of negative material the person deleted from their article – whether it was the sole reference to a notable criminal conviction or a ridiculous 500-word diatribe about their dispute with a neighbour in Solihull, added by a Solihull IP.
The media just seem to love the chance to take a cheap shot – one reason why I think we give the press far too much credit as encyclopedic sources. At any rate, they need educating.
Perhaps this a-priori assumption that if you "delete criticism" from a Wikipedia article you must be evil is a subconscious effect of the "encyclopedia" moniker, which makes people assume there must have been an editorial team involved, carefully vetting and balancing all this information.
A similar thing happens in deletion discussions. Some anonymous person writes a hatchet job about a borderline-notable figure. The person is horrified and complains, and an AfD or some other type of community discussion ensues.
Naturally, never having heard of the person, and in the absence of readily available alternative sources of information, everyone first of all reads the Wikipedia article that the subject says is the problem.
And without really noticing, they form a mental image of the person based on that article. The article may, as in a recent case I was involved in, contain references to statements the subject never made, be cherry-picked to make them look like a crank, assign vastly undue weight to the anonymous hatchet wielder's bugbear, and so forth. But the reader laps it all up. It's got footnotes!
And the standard Wikipedian response after perusing the article is: "Well, this guy is complaining that our article makes him look like a crank. But according to our article, he *is* a crank. He just doesn't like the truth."
And with that, truth is vanquished.