[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia has PR Problems

[Thomas Dalton]

On 17/05/2008, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Thomas Dalton wrote:
>  > We have a lot of bad PR, certainly, but do with have PR problems?
>  > Despite all the scandals in the press, Wikipedia holds a unique place
>  > in the public psyche as *the* place to go for pretty much anything you
>  > want to know, and that shows no signs of changing. Everyone may hate
>  > Wikipedia, but they still use it, and that's what matters.
>
>
> This pretty much conflicts with the way I view how we should behave and
>  how we should respond to criticism.
>
>  Being a popular website, being the place that "everyone" uses, is and
>  always has been only a tangential part of our mission.
>
>  What we are is a humanitarian, charitable, and serious effort to create
>  and maintain and distribute a high quality encyclopedia to every single
>  person on the planet, in their own language.  The fact that some set of
>  things is popular is, in large part, irrelevant to that mission.

But that popularity is what makes the site work. It works because we
have so many people wanting to help, we wouldn't have that if no-one
ever visited the site.

>  I think we need to look at the bad press that we sometimes get and
>  evaluate it seriously: sometimes it is unfair or silly.  But when bad
>  press comes because of something we actually did not do well, that we
>  could think seriously about how to do better, then the right response is
>  not to shrug our shoulders and say, "So what, we are popular?" but to
>  respond thoughtfully.
>
>  This is particularly true when issues of ethics and human dignity are at
>  stake, as they often are in cases of BLP-related bad press.

But that's not really PR problems, that's more fundamental problems
that the press just happens to be pointing out. I don't think the bad
PR we get is a problem. Some of the stuff the bad PR is about is a
problem (although most of it is just nonsense), but not because of the
bad PR.