Whoa whoa dont blow this e-mail out of proportian. UK Government bodies are not corrupt pieces of crap (unlike many government organisations around the globe) so do not immediatly draw that this is a publicity thing. The e-mail seems to me to praise the work of the wikipedia, ask an honest question about its operation and air a concern about a group of young idiots who are writing crap about the organisation.
Despite sending them numerous links on how to edit content they will not be inclined to do so. The main reason being people could see it as an attempt at self-publicising, a bit like Microsoft writing an article in a computing magazine.
Take this with good faith! :-) We are happy people!
On Tue, 21 Sep 2004 19:54:58 -0600, Fred Bauder fredbaud@ctelco.net wrote:
I have written a response to Barry, offlist, and posted it at [[Talk:National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth]]. Perhaps you could forward this suggestion about an external link to the Academy's information page to him.
Fred
From: Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2004 19:25:23 -0700 To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] [Barry.Meatyard@warwick.ac.uk: Entry in Wikipedia]
At 01:39 AM 9/22/2004 +0200, Jens Ropers wrote:
Maybe we should just send these guys this link [ http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml? title=National_Academy_for_Gifted_and_Talented_Youth&action=edit ] and tell them to work away.
Wouldn't that be a near-perfect solution? What do people think?
It wouldn't be a perfect solution in this case, because in addition to simply inquiring about how editing is done Barry is also asking for the removal of certain versions from the article history and for the version that their representative writes to be "protected" in some way. We need to explain both that we can't comply with those requests, and also that those things won't actually be necessary in order to get a nicely neutral article written and maintained against POV.
Personally, I'd recommend to them that they add an external link to their own "about us" page (to reassure them that they'll always have a way to present themselves according to their own terms) and to make copious use of the talk: page to explain and attribute any corrections they make to the article itself so that future editors will have a better idea of which information comes from which sources (while also pointing out that talk: pages have different community standards than article text, so that what they write there is pretty much immune from "tampering"). That's still no guarantee that the article will remain in the form that they prefer, but the information they add will hopefully be authoritative enough that it'll be hard to replace with inaccuracies in the future. Other editors will much more easily notice biases creeping back in if there's notes in talk: to work from.
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