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

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 01:44 PM 4/4/2010, Carcharoth wrote:
>What about Wikipedia editors who change career to become PR people? :-)
>
>Carcharoth
>
>(Who nevers wants to be a PR person, ever)

Not even to support a cause which, you might know, is not 
representing itself well, and you could help?

Pure, ethics-free PR, sure. I never want to be that kind of PR person 
either. I would not ever lie or deceive to promote a cause, paid or not.

But the skills I gained as a Wikipedia editor may prove to have been 
invaluable in the work I'm starting to do with cold fusion, which is 
to overcome widespread confusion based on how the early evidence was 
framed, with that framing then being applied reflexively to later 
evidence as it appeared, assuming that it was all the same. It wasn't.

I know what the critical results are, because they are the ones that 
convinced me to give up my own skepticism. They are not mentioned 
accurately in the Wikipedia article, and the most important, 
heat/helium correlation, still, is only cited with a blatant error in 
an anonymous 2004 DOE review (if that text were true, it would not be 
correlation at all, it would be anti-correlation), when the real 
results are covered extensively in reliable source (and even with 
accurate mention, I recently found, in Huizenga, the fiercest 
critic). ScienceApologist has started improving the article, it's 
possible he'll get to this, some of his work is quite good.

It was not intended that way, but my work on-wiki also introduced me 
to the cold fusion community, and through that to the senior 
scientists, and I've been asked to help edit a paper for submission 
to a mainstream journal. I know that Pcarbonn, also topic-banned 
(this time by a grossly unfair process on AN, spearheaded by JzG, 
who, those who followed RfAr/Abd and Jzg would know, was highly 
involved, but which wasn't disclosed there, nor was it disclosed that 
many of those voting were already involved....), got a job working as 
a researcher. Again, I see no sign that this was his goal, it simply 
fell out of being topic-banned and then turning more attention to 
direct involvement.

So thanks, Wikipedia.