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Date: Sat, 17 May 2008 10:31:46 +0300 From: jwales@wikia.com To: wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia has PR Problems
Thomas Dalton wrote:
We have a lot of bad PR, certainly, but do with have PR problems? Despite all the scandals in the press, Wikipedia holds a unique place in the public psyche as *the* place to go for pretty much anything you want to know, and that shows no signs of changing. Everyone may hate Wikipedia, but they still use it, and that's what matters.
This pretty much conflicts with the way I view how we should behave and how we should respond to criticism.
Being a popular website, being the place that "everyone" uses, is and always has been only a tangential part of our mission.
What we are is a humanitarian, charitable, and serious effort to create and maintain and distribute a high quality encyclopedia to every single person on the planet, in their own language. The fact that some set of things is popular is, in large part, irrelevant to that mission.
I think we need to look at the bad press that we sometimes get and evaluate it seriously: sometimes it is unfair or silly. But when bad press comes because of something we actually did not do well, that we could think seriously about how to do better, then the right response is not to shrug our shoulders and say, "So what, we are popular?" but to respond thoughtfully.
This is particularly true when issues of ethics and human dignity are at stake, as they often are in cases of BLP-related bad press.
--Jimbo
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