[WikiEN-l] PR consultants: perhaps Wikipedia is not the ideal promotional medium

[Samuel Klein]

On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 12:40 PM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote:
> A PR agent should be able to learn how to write a neutral article, if
> they see one aspect of their role as to provide information about
> their client, not necessarily to directly promote them.

Yes.  Treated properly, this energy could be put to good use producing
free knowledge.  I look forward to a world in which librarians, museum
curators, secretaries, agents, superintendnts and publishers all see
"creating or updating free content about their work" as part of their
normal duties.

> And if we had a systematic campaign to provide basic information about
> all companies that meet our notabiliity requirements, the way we do
> for populated places, it would greatly diminish the tendency for
> people to think they needed to write their own article.

Very true.   Crisp definitions of notability that allow for a
constructive list of all notable instances of the topic, and
systematic campaigns (with bot support for seeding and review) make a
tremendous difference in the stable growth of articles on that topic.

Rather than waiting for someone to both care about a group and
understand where to find notability guidelines, we should have lists
of notable groups without articles compiled by people who know those
guidelines and how to mine public databases.  Then the people who know
about the topic (but not WP policy quirks) can get to work writing the
article, people who cry NN on deletion discussions can be pointed to
the "list of notable <foo> without articles", and the aforementioned
writers can simply worry about citations, verifiability, and decent
prose.

People sometimes to say that 'all the easy articles have been
written', but I regularly run across topic areas which are
interesting, notable, but overlooked with tens of thousands of
subjects missing.  Geographic places in internet-free zones;
monuments and buildings in Asia and Africa; notable professors and
politicians outside of modern North America and Europe; businesses
that were notable in their day but have since merged or shut down;
notable published works that are out of print; even, as DGG says,
modern notable businesses, or bands and other artists who don't have a
Wikipedia-savvy following.

SJ

> David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
>
>
>
> On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 5:34 AM, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
>> This article makes my week.
>>
>> I generally feel we should blank articles more and delete them less,
>> but this is an area where the explicit rebuff of deletion has its
>> advantages.
>>
>> SJ
>>
>> On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 8:41 PM, Durova <nadezhda.durova at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Excellent piece.  Especially the close about how it's a difficult position
>>> for PR professionals to report to the client that the article was deleted.
>>>
>>> -Durova
>>>
>>> On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 1:35 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> http://rushprnews.com/2010/03/31/pr-consultants-should-think-twice-before-using-wikipedia-to-promote-clients
>>>>
>>>> PR consultants should think twice before using Wikipedia to promote clients
>>>> March 31, 2010
>>>>
>>>> Leicestershire, UK (RPRN) 03/31/10 — PR consultants are being advised
>>>> to think twice before incorporating Wikipedia entries into campaign
>>>> strategies after the site started cracking down on articles submitted
>>>> by any public relations agency it considered to be using its resource
>>>> to promote clients.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> (muwahaha. Spotted by Mathias Schindler. The article sets out en:wp's
>>>> rationales and likely actions very well indeed.)
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> - d.
>>>>
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>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> http://durova.blogspot.com/
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