On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 10:58 AM, Michael Snow wikipedia@verizon.net wrote:
geni wrote:
2009/12/15 Michael Snow wikipedia@verizon.net:
That's a strangely limited notion of who has the capability to help - only people who are quantitatively more famous than us? For a project that's built around lots and lots of individual contributions (whether we're talking content, finances, or publicity), none of them especially huge in the overall scheme of things, it seems completely backwards to suggest that such things are useless if they don't dwarf what has already been achieved.
The argument was that it was his fame that was helpful and that it rose to the level that we should overlook the obvious problem. If you wish to take my comments out of that context I can't stop you but you are attacking a strawman.
I don't see why it would be out of context, or attacking a straw man, to challenge this understanding of what fame entails, or how much is needed for it to be helpful. As it's been said about this interconnected age, most of us end up being famous for perhaps 15 people, and sometimes to a wider audience for 15 minutes. Clearly less than the overall fame of Wikipedia, yet when it comes to endorsements or testimonials, that has been a big part of achieving it, something marketers would call word-of-mouth or buzz. Fame is highly context-dependent, so both the magnitude and the usefulness vary with the circumstances. (That's part of the reason to test different fundraising approaches against each other.)
Indeed; and arguably Craig Newmark is much, much more famous in San Francisco (where he's a local celeb) than he would be pretty much anywhere else. That might be part of the issue here. If you know who he is in the SF-tech-community-philanthropy context, it might strike you as more of a clear use of his good name to generously support a cool project. If you don't, it might look like more of a clear advertisement for Craigslist.
Regardless this is basically the same debate we had over Virgin Unite -- the name of any commercial organization (and probably any other nonprofit organization, too, if we're honest with ourselves) being displayed on the site provokes intense dislike and debate among a large section of the community -- for various reasons, but mostly summarized as we don't want to use the resources of Wikipedia to advocate or advertise for another organization.
-- phoebe