Matt R wrote:
Doesn't seem overly "spikey" to me, unless I've missed further debate elsewhere. Why exactly do these Wikipedians need to "cool it"? As AfD goes, it seems pretty harmless. I'm sorry, but I don't really think it's constructive to shout and swear at Wikipedians based on what appears to be an unconvincing example of us treating outsiders badly.
Whether he's overreacting or not is actually not so relevant. When we piss off people with an audience, they will tend to say so to their audience. Is this something to be avoided if possible?
[ ] yes [ ] no
Feel free to stay in self-righteous denial about a PR nightmare.
- d.
--- David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Matt R wrote:
Doesn't seem overly "spikey" to me, unless I've missed further debate elsewhere. Why exactly do these Wikipedians need to "cool it"? As AfD goes, it seems pretty harmless. I'm sorry, but I don't really think it's constructive to shout and swear at Wikipedians based on what appears to be an unconvincing example of us treating outsiders badly.
Whether he's overreacting or not is actually not so relevant. When we piss off people with an audience, they will tend to say so to their audience. Is this something to be avoided if possible?
I think the AfD response to that particular page was completely reasonable. If that guy was upset about his treatment here in this instance, then that's just his problem. They did not need to "COOL IT" "FOR FUCKS SAKE".
Feel free to stay in self-righteous denial about a PR nightmare.
Any chance you could be less rude? I'm in "self-righteous denial" just because I didn't heartily endorse your comment? Come on. It's quite reasonable to question your example, particularly when it doesn't really demonstrate any problems of the sort you claim it does.
From what I've seen in press articles, Wikipedia's real PR problems come from a
perception of unreliability, and not from how we treat questionably-notable people who decide to write encyclopedia articles about themselves.
-- Matt
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Matt_Crypto Blog: http://cipher-text.blogspot.com
___________________________________________________________ Win a BlackBerry device from O2 with Yahoo!. Enter now. http://www.yahoo.co.uk/blackberry
On 1/27/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Matt R wrote:
Doesn't seem overly "spikey" to me, unless I've missed further debate elsewhere. Why exactly do these Wikipedians need to "cool it"? As AfD goes, it seems pretty harmless. I'm sorry, but I don't really think it's constructive to shout and swear at Wikipedians based on what appears to be an unconvincing example of us treating outsiders badly.
Whether he's overreacting or not is actually not so relevant. When we piss off people with an audience, they will tend to say so to their audience. Is this something to be avoided if possible?
[ ] yes [ ] no
Feel free to stay in self-righteous denial about a PR nightmare.
- d.
Is there any reasonable way of deleting article's that will never result in pissing of the author or subject of the article?
[ ] yes [ ] no
If not what level of pissing off is acceptable and what is the optimium cost benifit point. -- geni
"David Gerard" wrote
Feel free to stay in self-righteous denial about a PR nightmare.
My past experience, not always but sometimes, is that phrases like "PR nightmare" can be used as a smokescreen for doing the 'wrong thing'. As in: why are we not doing the 'right thing' here? Well, it would be a 'PR nightmare'. Or in other words, having maturity enough to get round to admitting the organisation is fallible makes image management harder. (Of course, image management for an organisation that is infallible is like falling off a log.)
To get back to WP and David's point, which is not invalid by any stretch of the imagination, we should continue to delete pages about living people that are clearly self-promotional rather than informative. We actually cannot screen out the creation of such pages, so we have to delete them. We enfranchise anyone who can type, so there is going to be some juvenilia posted. Our PR line actually must factor that in: we are not EB, you don't have to have an office in a prestigious academic institution for your opinion about what goes in WP to matter to _us_. So, yeah, some ignorant things are said. But, look, who exactly is fighting to combat ignorance on such a broad and accessible front, as of January 2006?
I agree with David that people should be calm, cool and collected as they go about their business; and with Morven that profanity has not very much to do with achieving that aim.
Charles
David Gerard wrote:
Matt R wrote:
Doesn't seem overly "spikey" to me, unless I've missed further debate elsewhere. Why exactly do these Wikipedians need to "cool it"? As AfD goes, it seems pretty harmless. I'm sorry, but I don't really think it's constructive to shout and swear at Wikipedians based on what appears to be an unconvincing example of us treating outsiders badly.
Whether he's overreacting or not is actually not so relevant. When we piss off people with an audience, they will tend to say so to their audience. Is this something to be avoided if possible?
[ ] yes [ ] no
Feel free to stay in self-righteous denial about a PR nightmare.
- d.
Telling people to cool it won't solve anything, from my experience -- especially in a volunteer project. As I've been saying on [[WT:AFD]], we need to reduce the volume on AfD so people:
1. Don't get stressed out and all tense from voting "delete" on a dozen garage bands, and carry this attitude over to possibly valid article deletion debates; 2. Are able to devote more time to reviewing the points of fact on each controversial debate, and thus come to a more reasoned conclusion; 3. Don't have to worry about brevity for the sake of ensuring all "nn bio" articles are deleted -- many AfD regulars keep their comments brief because they have to spread their attention over almost 200 debates everyday.
John Lee ([[User:Johnleemk]])
John Lee wrote:
Telling people to cool it won't solve anything, from my experience -- especially in a volunteer project. As I've been saying on [[WT:AFD]], we need to reduce the volume on AfD so people:
- Don't get stressed out and all tense from voting "delete" on a dozen garage bands, and carry this attitude over to possibly valid article deletion debates;
- Are able to devote more time to reviewing the points of fact on each controversial debate, and thus come to a more reasoned conclusion;
- Don't have to worry about brevity for the sake of ensuring all "nn bio" articles are deleted -- many AfD regulars keep their comments brief because they have to spread their attention over almost 200 debates everyday.
My favourite suggestion is to simply extend the duration of an AfD listing to a month. Takes the time pressure off, allows plenty of time for lengthy discussion and fixing of articles that need it. Since the rate of inflow and outflow doesn't change this would have no significant impact on the "backlog" aside from a one-time expansion of about three weeks' worth of AfD listings (not much in a multi-hundred-thousand article work).
Further changes to AfD may still be needed but this strikes me as a reasonably nondisruptive first step.