On 10 June 2014 21:30, Kevin Gorman kgorman@gmail.com wrote:
I was invited to the meeting Bill refers to, but unfortunately unable to attend. I've talked to a number of the participants though, and would like to stress that this is, well, er, not a joke. The PR-side people involved in this are sincere in what they state, and I genuinely believe that this is probably the best opportunity we've had to establish a working relationship with the PR industry that preserves the integrity of our encyclopedia while avoiding stuff like Bell Pottinger, Wiki-PR, and all the low level constant PR manipulation that occurs throughout our sites that we've ever been presented with.
IME this is from the decent PR people who are really nice, do in fact know what Wikipedia is and love it too, even if they're the sort of people who think infographics are excellent things. They're not too happy with the spammy types either.
(The most effective way I've found to get the point about "bright line" being a pretty good idea is to point to all the examples of the media *absolutely crucifying* people or companies for anything within a mile of a conflict of interest. That's *not* the sort of thing a decent PR wants on their track record.)
- d.