Ben Yates wrote:
Articles like this are getting lots of traffic from digg and other places, and significantly damaging wikipedia's reputation. The way to combat that is not to refuse to be interviewed; it's to get the other side of the story out more effectively. I'm not sure of the best way to do that, but I don't think the occasional bunker mentality here helps.
We've got a neutral news outlet that we could go to; Wikinews. Perhaps someone who's actually familiar with the case could write a "view from the other side" and post it there, that way when discussions arise on blogs and Slashdot and whatever there'll be someplace that they can be directed to.
It shouldn't be a whitewash, mind you; Wikinews shouldn't be a propaganda arm for anyone. But in cases like this IMO a straightforward recounting of the facts one feels that the Register omitted would go a long way toward defusing a lot of the bad publicity. I've found that people are usually quite willing to accept the notion that a news story was skewed by poor reporting if there's some evidence to back that up.