On 21/08/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote: Would this or something like it make a decent press release? - d.

On 8/21/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote: I'm CCing Sheldon Rampton of PR Watch on this. Sheldon is a leading expert on the PR industry and also hosts a wiki, sourcewatch.org, that deals specifically with these organizations. Given his many years of experience, I think he can give us some good advice on which approaches will work and which ones won't. My take on it is that if we push PR industries to far to the outside, they will just do their work clandestinely. This will damage Wikipedia's reputation far more if it becomes known, especially when an article that has 200+ revisions was started and carefully groomed by a paid propagandist. I don't see a compelling reasons why we need to force PR people to start articles _outside_ Wikipedia and go through some "trusted Wikipedian". In fact, it seems to me that doing so is more likely to lead to untraceable transactions. We must not just care about appearances, we must also care about the facts. Having a clean track record is better than some muddy variant of Chinese whispers. I think a separate article creation process as described under WP:COI might work best: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflicts_of_interest The user space has historically allowed POV material. It would give us a good record of all PR groups operating within Wikipedia. Surely it is in our interest to have such a record? -- Peace & Love, Erik

If it hasn't been suggested already and this is not simply PR'n on an easy target with the "very very strongly", subscribing this list to the PRwatch weekly spin summary would help to remind admins about what to look out for on a regular basis. That would actually seem like very, very strong emphasis on the importance of this: http://two.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/weekly-spin The entire month up until now: http://www.prwatch.org/spin Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote: I think we need to be very clear in a lot of different places that PR firms editing Wikipedia is something that we frown upon very very strongly. The appearance of impropriety is so great that we should make it very very strongly clear to these firms that we do not approve of what they would like to do. It is all well and good to say, well, it is ok so long as they remain neutral, but if they really want to write neutral articles, they can do so, on their own websites, and release the work under the FDL, and notify Wikipedians who are totally independent. Additionally, it is always appropriate to interact on the talk pages of articles. If a PR firm is not happy about how something is presented about their client, they can identify themselves openly on the talk page, and present well-reasoned arguments and additional information and links. Of course it is always going to be the case that unethical practitioners may get involved in inappropriate behavior, but I think this is no argument for simply accepting it. Rather, it is a strong argument for asking people to do this the right way: transparently and allowing independent editors to make the actual editing decisions. --Jimbo _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l --------------------------------- Get your email and more, right on the new Yahoo.com