[WikiEN-l] Fwd: The counterattack of the PR companies

[Charles Matthews]

On 18 April 2012 15:26, Ken Arromdee <arromdee at rahul.net> wrote:

> >> This directly conflicts with the Wikipedia FAQ/Article subjects (2012)
> page
> >> that specifically
> >> asks public relations professionals to remove vandalism, fix minor
> errors
> >> in spelling,
> >> grammar, usage or facts, provide references for existing content, and
> add
> >> or update facts
> >> with references such as number of employees or event details.
> >But the real-life situation is that someone paid to edit has a boss and/or
> >paymaster. Jimbo knows what he is doing here with sending out a soundbite,
> >rather than citing the page. The boss can understand the soundbite, and is
> >almost certainly not going to bother to understand the page.
>
> Let me get this straight.  You are arguing "It is okay to for Jimbo to tell
> the company something which contradicts policy because it's more likely
> the company will understand the non-policy than the actual policy".
>

The COI guideline is not an official policy. That is the kind of
distinction lost on many people, it seems.

Jimbo is accountable in some rarefied sense for whatever he says. To whom,
it is not quite clear. But, assuming he is speaking in what you could call
his "ambassadorial role", which is one of his hats, his job is to act as
diplomats do. What he says is perfectly fine as a clarification of the
community's position (which is what he states it to be). The
counter-argument runs like this: we showed your guideline to our legal
department, and we are told it doesn't say that. To which the answer is:
show legal documents to your legal department, and you'll get good sense.
Show documents drafted by our community, who aren't lawyers, to your legal
department, and you'll get crud. We know what to make of wikilawyers. If we
make it quite clear to ordinary folk what we really mean, and you go after
weaknesses in the drafting by calling in your hired legal guns who are paid
infinitely more an hour than our volunteers, just to prove we don't know
what we are saying, then you are not respecting us, are you?

So Jimbo says that in a more punchy way.

>
> >Yes indeed. Jimbo neither makes policy nor enforces it, of course.
>
> "Besides, it's their own fault for listening to Jimbo anyway.  They should
> know enough about Wikipedia to understand that he doesn't make policy.  I
> mean, he's just the public face of Wikipedia, why would anyone who needs to
> know about Wikipedia policy listen to him?"
>
> To any normal person, this is simply a case of Wikipedia contradicting
> itself.  The fact that it's not because Jimbo doesn't make policy is a
> piece of Wiki-arcana that the outsider really can't be expected to
> understand.  The fact that we're deliberately trying to get the people to
> listen to Jimbo and ignore the actual policy just makes it worse.
>
> See above. Jimbo can leverage his celebrity status to communicate to
people who only read business magazines and books. The fact is that there
is a published literature on Wikipedia, and people who really have an
interest in the site can read that, not the five-second version.

All policies and guidelines come with a context, you know.

Charles