Dear Andreas, We need to remember that this is a volunteer driven process, and the commodity in short supply is volunteer time not PR professionals time. Encouraging PR people to forum shop by raising the same thing in multiple venues is disrespectful of the community, it also risks damaging things for the PR flacks as the temptation would be to ignore them as they are likely to have raised things elsewhere. What we should be doing is advising them of the best place to go with their problem, and the best way to escalate things if that doesn't work. The confict of Interest noticeboard is not usually going to be appropriate for them, as it says: "Post here if you are concerned that an editor has a COI, and is using Wikipedia to promote their own interests at the expense of neutrality". Where a Living person is being misreported then the BLP noticeboard is an option for escalation. But encouraging PR flacks to forum shop is not going to be part of a workable solution. We need to work with the grain of the community and that means understanding that forum shoppers get short shrift.

As for the idea that all PR complaints should be responded to within 24 hours, that would have the effect of prioritising the updating of a company article to name a company's new chair above dealing with a case of cyber bullying in a school playground. I suspect that most of us would take the ethical line that dealing with cyber bullying gets priority over a slightly out of date business article. Yes it would be good to know how quick OTRS is, and if OTRS needs additional volunteers, but if OTRS needs to prioritise anything it should be serious issues above less serious ones, and some business related issues will be more urgent than others. I would be surprised if OTRS doesn't already have some such prioritisation system, if only that volunteers will concentrate on the urgent stuff.

WSC

Oh, I didn't mean that PR people should get an answer within 24 hours and everyone else can wait four weeks. :) I meant that *everyone* should get an answer within 24 hours. If you feel an article is really harmful to you, even 24 hours can seem a very long time.

The advantage of a noticeboard like COIN is that there are regulars: people check that page daily. A page like Talk:Vodacom is checked by no one. You can post a message there, and it will probably be ignored for months.

The idea is not to encourage people to forum-shop, but to direct them to a single functioning noticeboard to raise their complaint, and to leave a pointer on the article talk page so that any regulars at that article are advised of the noticeboard discussion.

It doesn't have to be COIN, but it would be good to have a well-publicised and centralised place, if only to be able to assess responsiveness. When things are spread out over God knows how many unknown talk pages, it is hard to see how well Wikipedia responds to justified complaints.

Andreas

On 14 November 2012 00:00, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 11:24 PM, Paul Wilkinson <paul.wilkinson@pwcom.co.uk> wrote:

Dear Andreas
Francis Ingham is DG of the PRCA. Its fee-paying members include RLM Finsbury (among other WPP companies), so, ultimately, it contributes to his salary. Possible COI?

Paul

Come on, you are a CIPR fellow, and CIPR and PRCA are rival bodies. In fact, Ingham used to be the CIPR's assistant director, until he defected to the PRCA. Shall I make an ad-hominem comment based on your COI too?

Yes, Finsbury is one of several hundred members of PRCA. Even so Ingham did not condone their behaviour. And what he says about the poor perception of PR professionals is the same thing CIPR have said (and according to Wikipedia, it's one thing CIPR and PRCA agree on, and have collaborated on).

The question is not, does the man have a COI; the question is, Is there merit in what he says?

And there is. Oliver's revamp of the Contact Us pages has made a huge difference, because previously, PR professionals would pass three invitations to fix the article themselves before they would come to the OTRS e-mail address.

But there is still room for improvement. OTRS e-mails should be responded to the same day, not up to four weeks later. Is anyone collecting data on how quickly OTRS mails are responded to? Are those data public? If not, there is another potential area for improvement.

PR professionals could be invited to post to the COI noticeboard AND the article talk page at the same time (leaving a link on the article talk page to the COIN discussion), so they get a prompt response. There should be a discussion whether PR professionals should be forbidden or encouraged to contribute to COI noticeboard queries where they do not have a COI themselves beyond being PR professionals too. These are some ideas.

Andreas

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