Hello all,

I thought you might like to know that I spoke with the journalist from PR Week yesterday about the story they published on this issue. They are keen to include it in their print edition, which goes out tomorrow.

The main points:

I reminded him of the existing guidelines that Wikipedians, Wikimedia UK and the CIPR worked on and recommended the guidelines to his readers
I explained that COI doesn't just apply to PR professionals, but to everyone. We aren't making PR a special case in that respect

Wikipedia is a collaborative, voluntary project - nobody owns the content
I also made the point that Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, not a PR platform.
I was asked if I had any specific response to the PRCA comments, but really there's nothing helpful to add there, except that talk pages and emails needn't be cumbersome.

If anyone has any specific concerns and would like to discuss them, I'm more than happy to discuss this, on or off list.

Thanks and regards,

Stevie

Here is a good thread started by a Wikipedia admin, Smartse:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales#Spotting_off-wiki_disputes_that_end_up_causing_serious_problems_here.

He gives the example of a person who posted at least seven times to the AIV board about clear BLP violations, and never got an answer. (Of course it's not the right board, or the right format, but it shows how people struggle with our system.)

As I said in that discussion, the underlying problem seems to be that we have a certain number of low-notability articles that are only (or mainly) edited by the subjects themselves, and the people who hate them.

Andreas