[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia has PR Problems

[Ray Saintonge]

Jimmy Wales 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.
>   
It's not completely tangential when it's the measure of success.  It's 
all a part of the feedback loop.
> 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 the fact also is that we also have people who react with such alarm 
that an otherwise trivial or silly issue becomes a public spectacle.

Ec