I got a call yesterday from a press officer for a major UK bank. My number was one of the few contact numbers they could find.
They spent lots of time yesterday morning adding stuff to the bank's article from their websites and having it reverted as a copyright violation. They couldn't work out what she was doing wrong, so they called me. They hadn't heard about the Microsoft mess at all. Oh dear.
I explained that editing the article about yourself is a conflict of interest, and pointed them at the talk page and said this was the right place to put stuff - that they should introduce themselves, etc. And that people might argue, but that happens on the Internet. I also said I'd have a look myself.
Well, that's one more innocent disaster averted ...
But we really need something to handle this sort of thing and make it widely known. Something as n00b-friendly as possible - just type on a page (or in a form) or send an email.
Which will mean another firehose of crap to find volunteers to deal with. This is the tricky bit. Compare to OTRS, which has the twin problems of (1) a firehose of crap with a few important things in it and (2) too few volunteers, who then get (understandably) tetchy and close to burnout, and not great success at recruiting more.
So:
0. I submit that we really do need this. 1. Most n00b-friendly interface possible. This is not a big problem. 2. How to get volunteers interested in wanting to look at this? This is the tricky one.
Ideas please!
(I'm tempted to submit this to Ask Slashdot for ideas ... any objections?)
Another bad publicity storm such as happened last week to Microsoft is absolutely not in Wikipedia or Wikimedia's interests. We don't want to make organisations fearful of coming near us.
- d.
Copyright violation warnings should point users to the appropriate contact details to let us know they own the copyright and specifically tell them about what email address to use to contact us, so the process is stream-lined (avoiding long exchanges with users being told new info one bit at a time).
Mgm
On 1/31/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
I got a call yesterday from a press officer for a major UK bank. My number was one of the few contact numbers they could find.
They spent lots of time yesterday morning adding stuff to the bank's article from their websites and having it reverted as a copyright violation. They couldn't work out what she was doing wrong, so they called me. They hadn't heard about the Microsoft mess at all. Oh dear.
I explained that editing the article about yourself is a conflict of interest, and pointed them at the talk page and said this was the right place to put stuff - that they should introduce themselves, etc. And that people might argue, but that happens on the Internet. I also said I'd have a look myself.
Well, that's one more innocent disaster averted ...
But we really need something to handle this sort of thing and make it widely known. Something as n00b-friendly as possible - just type on a page (or in a form) or send an email.
Which will mean another firehose of crap to find volunteers to deal with. This is the tricky bit. Compare to OTRS, which has the twin problems of (1) a firehose of crap with a few important things in it and (2) too few volunteers, who then get (understandably) tetchy and close to burnout, and not great success at recruiting more.
So:
- I submit that we really do need this.
- Most n00b-friendly interface possible. This is not a big problem.
- How to get volunteers interested in wanting to look at this? This
is the tricky one.
Ideas please!
(I'm tempted to submit this to Ask Slashdot for ideas ... any objections?)
Another bad publicity storm such as happened last week to Microsoft is absolutely not in Wikipedia or Wikimedia's interests. We don't want to make organisations fearful of coming near us.
- d.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On Wed, 31 Jan 2007 10:46:03 +0000, "David Gerard" dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Which will mean another firehose of crap to find volunteers to deal with. This is the tricky bit. Compare to OTRS, which has the twin problems of (1) a firehose of crap with a few important things in it and (2) too few volunteers, who then get (understandably) tetchy and close to burnout, and not great success at recruiting more.
I volunteered for OTRS, and was contacted back a while ago, but have heard nothing more since. Maybe there are volunteers after all...
Guy (JzG)
On 1/31/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
- I submit that we really do need this.
- Most n00b-friendly interface possible. This is not a big problem.
Remember my proposal a month or two ago for a big friendly "Report a problem" button that appears to anon readers of articles? That would then divide up into wizards for different categories of problems like copy vios or libel or whatever? Is that a good starting point?
Steve
On Thu, 1 Feb 2007 01:09:21 +1100, "Steve Bennett" stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Remember my proposal a month or two ago for a big friendly "Report a problem" button that appears to anon readers of articles? That would then divide up into wizards for different categories of problems like copy vios or libel or whatever? Is that a good starting point?
I'd say it was. We need to make it much easier to lead people along the right paths.
Guy (JzG)
On 1/31/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/31/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
- I submit that we really do need this.
- Most n00b-friendly interface possible. This is not a big problem.
Remember my proposal a month or two ago for a big friendly "Report a problem" button that appears to anon readers of articles? That would then divide up into wizards for different categories of problems like copy vios or libel or whatever? Is that a good starting point?
Steve
But we already have that! Click "Contact us" in the left sidebar, and there you have a wizard-like interface. If you click "Report a problem", you get to a page which has options like "An article has used copyrighted content without permission" and "There's a problem in an article about you or someone you represent". If I'd never seen wikipedia before and found a problem with an article about me, "Contact us" would be the first thing I click.
Granted, most of them leads to the otrs queue, but that's a separate problem. When it comes to directing users to places with help, I think we've made it as easy as it could be, short of posting a banner saying "DOES THIS ARTICLE CONTAIN LIBEL ABOUT YOU?" at the top of every article.
--Oskar