[WikiEN-l] More about PR firms - First post here by myself

[Mathias Schindler]

On 8/22/06, Michelle D'israeli <m.k.disraeli at bham.ac.uk> wrote:

> Before my main thoughts, an idea just (literally) occured to me -
> have the Germans discussed this yet? They seem to be ahead of
> the game on a number of points, from what i've bumped into.
> Unfortunately, my german vocabulary is very limited, so I can't
> really go have a look :(

de.wp had a similar discussion in 2005 about politicians and political
activist groups that were messing around in wikipedia in biographies
of opposing politicians. In general, dewp does not appear to have
major problems with PR companies. And if so, it would not be much
different to how we already deal with entities who are discovering
wikipedia via an article about themself (which is fine) and messing
around with it (which is not fine). We talk to them, if possible.
Several german speaking magazines from the PR industry have issued
warnings about editing in wikipedia in an inproper way because of the
risks associated with it of being exposed in public. The general
strategy could be described as "talk to them, encourage them to use
the talk page, ask them to behave nicely".

The article about the Siemens company is quite often edited by IPs
from the Siemens network. The vast majority of these edits is positive
such as updating of figures. This is insofar funny as I spoke with an
employee from Siemens' PR department and he insisted that they should
be the only from Siemens to edit the article and that no other
employee is allowed to make public statements about Siemens. He later
realized by himself that he shouldn't be worried about this Siemens
policy or Wikipedia but rather about his superiois finding out that
the PR department is getting more and more redundant :)

The problem of external PR companies is (IMHO) associated with the
kind of articles that each wiki allows. If you focus on concepts and
principles and more about the thing in general, rather than a destinct
product from a specific company, you might be able to avoid a lot of
problems as there is no place for PR companies to land. Focus on
[[car]] not on [[Mercedes L-400 2006 edition 1,5l diesel with ipod
socket]].