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
They may presume that the presence of stuff that hasn't yet been de-pufferied (I made that word up) means that what they write will stay. But the key point is lack of control. If you put something on Wikipedia, you cannot control the content and that is what a lot of people fail to understand. It becomes part of the wiki-editing process, which at its best produces great stuff, and at its worst produces some rather bad stuff.
Carcharoth
On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 7:18 PM, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net 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
A PR agent should be able to learn how to write a neutral article, if they see one aspect of their role as to provide information about their client, not necessarily to directly promote them. In the fields I work in, I have frequently worked with PR staff, and about half of them have proved open to learning a new medium. (The basic instruction I give them is to write a dull an article as possible, remove all possible adjectives, use the minimum number of words, give the name of the company only once, list nobody but the successive CEOs, provide specific sourced numbers about market share, and give no contact information beyond the principal web site.) And when I see a promotional article for a notable company, if I have the time i neither delete nor blank it, but rewrite it according to my just those instructions.
And if we had a systematic campaign to provide basic information about all companies that meet our notabiliity requirements, the way we do for populated places, it would greatly diminish the tendency for people to think they needed to write their own article.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 5:34 AM, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
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@gmail.com wrote:
Excellent piece. Especially the close about how it's a difficult position for PR professionals to report to the client that the article was deleted.
-Durova
On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 1:35 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
http://rushprnews.com/2010/03/31/pr-consultants-should-think-twice-before-us...
PR consultants should think twice before using Wikipedia to promote clients March 31, 2010
Leicestershire, UK (RPRN) 03/31/10 PR consultants are being advised to think twice before incorporating Wikipedia entries into campaign strategies after the site started cracking down on articles submitted by any public relations agency it considered to be using its resource to promote clients.
(muwahaha. Spotted by Mathias Schindler. The article sets out en:wp's rationales and likely actions very well indeed.)
- d.
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