[WikiEN-l] David is on Channel 4 tonight re MS issue

[David Gerard]

On 26/01/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 26/01/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> > I'm just getting ready for C4 to pick me up, take me to their office
> > and interview me for tonight's news re: the Microsoft-Wikipedia issue.
> > If someone could record it and throw us an MPEG afterwards, that would
> > be most helpful!

> News is 7-7:30pm. C4 apparently do video streaming off their site as well.


Sit down, camera rolls.

"Okay. What was Microsoft's crime?"
"Well, I wouldn't call it a *crime* ..."

Talked about how it was a conflict of interest and that's bad, how "I
said this can only damage their good name and then it damaged their
good name". What OOXML is (the Office 2007 file format) and why it's
greatly contentious (competition from OpenDocument and OpenOfficeorg).
How Doug Mahugh is on the talk page now and that's good and Rick
Jelliffe will hopefully contribute his expertise and that's good. So
that's the current problem pretty much dealt with.

They have no idea how much will be used tonight, "between five seconds
and five minutes." It depends whether e.g. John Reid says something
particularly stupid in the next hour ;-)

The issue now, the real problem, is how Wikipedia deals with this sort
of thing in the future. We have procedures for actual legal problems,
but not yet for this sort of editorial problem. Something where
companies with issues with content can say so, and where the regular
volunteers will take an interest and look into improving articles
based on that.

We don't have that yet. I said we'd probably work out something over
the weekend.

So, regular editors. How do we set up a page or forum where companies
and people written about can express editorial concerns (rather than
e.g. legal ones), such that they know people will at least look over
them with thought and improve the articles from there?

This was a MAJOR news story and it came completely out of the blue.
But it is an ongoing problem for Wikipedia - we don't want companies
fearful of dealing with us in case they get the sort of bad press this
issue got Microsoft and Doug Mahugh. How can we get better at this,
quickly?


- d.