[Foundation-l] advertising craigslist

[phoebe ayers]

On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 10:58 AM, Michael Snow <wikipedia at verizon.net> wrote:
> geni wrote:
>> 2009/12/15 Michael Snow <wikipedia at 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


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