Jim McKeeth wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
Hardly anybody has a clue that we exist. Frankly, we're at the stage where "Any publicity is good publicity.". We could issue a press release claiming to surpass Britannic now, and it would be an obvious lie, but still good publicity in the end.
If there were a press release that said we surpassed Britannica and a whole bunch of people came out and then someone makes a big fuss about how we don't really pass Britannica then people will remember Wikipedia in a bad way. Then when 100,000 articles is released then everyone will say "Oh yeah, I remember when they said they passed Britannica - what a disappointment - I won't bother checking them out again."
When the 100,000 article count is released down the line, most of the people on the Internet at that time won't have been on it at the time of the old release (that is now). Anything that gets our name in the air will be helpful, because people will hear rumours and want to check it out for themselves.
You always want any publicity to be modest so when someone comes they will be pleasantly surprised. They will remember us as being more then they expected which will keep us in a positive light.
I myself want publicity to be honest, because I'm an honest person. That's the reason that I wouldn't want this hypothetical lying press release. If we think about what will generate the best publicity, then we're thinking about the wrong bottom line.
We don't really need to discuss this to death very much, since nobody actually wants to send out that press release, and I agree with mav for my own reasons (our own integrity) that we should report as accurate an article count as practicable. The 500 byte minimum sounds reasonable to me.
-- Toby