Christiano Moreschi wrote:
Or maybe just get a full-time Wikipedia PR machine up and running, to counter all the bad spin. Certainly, the more high-profile we get the more flak we'll cop. I agree that Stable Versions will help - do we have a release date for them yet?
While I don't like seeing misrepresentations of Wikipedia any more than anyone else and do my part to counter them "in real life" when talking to people, I'm not sure it's actually that huge a deal. Attacks on Wikipedia are increasing because we're becoming more popular, basically without any advertising or PR---simply because we're an extremely useful resource. So long as we remain a useful resource, we're going to be popular, regardless of whether the PR we get is good or bad. The chances that some bad newspaper PR will cause people to stop using Wikipedia are pretty small. Of course, things that both improve our usefulness as a resource *and* have the side-effect of nice PR (like stable versions) are worth pursuing. =]
-Mark