It would be interesting to see the community develop its own high profile media contacts so this view can be communicated to the world!
If Jimmy can write this in The Guardian (a paper which really seems to like him a lot),
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Together, we won the battle against Sopa and Pipa. Together, we can win this one too.
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and it ends up copied in newspapers around the world,
https://news.google.co.uk/news/story?q=%22Together,+we+won+the+battle+agains... .,cf.osb&biw=1066&bih=743&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ncl=dgWkAFmBLjQBsNMJyGJqPnbvsPpkM&sa=X&ei=xXTrT8rQHYqp8QO_hqXVBQ&ved=0CC0QqgIwAA
attributed to the Wikipedia founder, then there really is no discernible difference between his view and Wikipedia's, or Google's.
Hi folks - I'm a bit late to this thread, but I wanted to chime in. The Communications Committee list/group brought up the issue of some wildly inaccurate headlines on this story over the last 48hrs, and with their help and some outreach we've tried to get some corrections.
The press is going to make a very logical, if occasionally wildly inaccurate, series of judgements on how to frame this whole topic/issue up. Headlines are commonly over-generalized to the point of being dead wrong - "Wikipedia backs Richard O'Dwyer petition" etc.
The Wikimedia (chapter etc) folks who work with the press around the world are regularly doing everything possible to avoid the overly general summaries that come out in the media. We (and certainly WMF) are highly sensitive to incorrect facts, and generally the media actually appreciate it when we're able to reach out and get corrections. Wikimedians and readers of the stories who offer up comments/responses on stories - below the story - can help with this too. In some cases we have relationships with senior editors at outlets and can get things fixed quickly. In other cases timezones and publication timelines make this harder to resolve.
I know how quickly a bad headline can spiral into more headlines and echoing of false information. We hold the news outlets who originate those stories and the ones that continue to repeat them accountable, and we ask them to get it right.
Just wanted to let you know that there's almost always an effort underway to get corrections recorded. Jimmy is also very sensitive to these facts and frequently when he sees an issue in a story he was interviewed for he writes directly to the reporter for a fix.
jay