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

[Andreas Kolbe]

On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 1:41 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 19 April 2012 12:31, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 8:17 AM, Charles Matthews <
> > charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>
> >> Continuation of conversation:
> >> "Look, we're all impressed with Wikipedia. But you seem to be saying
> that
> >> to edit I have to put your project ahead of my day job; and so I think
> you
> >> guys are just a bit crazed."
>
> > Well, in reality the discussion may be more like this:
>
>
> No, Charles has rendered the conversations I've had on the subject
> pretty accurately (if skeletally).



I'm sure both scenarios occur. I don't know what the solution is.

As Sarah says, telling PR people whose day job it is to just present one
side of the story to go right ahead isn't the solution. But we cannot close
our eyes to the fact that there are editors who for whatever reason
similarly have made it their job to only present one side of the story;
that PR people may have a legitimate grievance when they come to Wikipedia;
and that the restrictions we are applying to them are not applying to the
anonymous editors on the "other side", for whom we prescribe "assume good
faith", the right to edit anonymously, protection from having their motives
questioned, and so forth.

Usually we let activists of every couleur fight things out for years, until
they come to a bloody end in arbitration. (Traditional Wikipedia wisdom is
of course that having people with opposite POVs collaborate leads to
neutral articles, which works nowhere near as well as Wikipedia would like
to pretend.) Yet in this scenario, we are turning the PR person with the
obvious COI into a pariah, while shielding the anonymous activist editor
whose COI is less easy to pin down, but indistinguishable in terms of
editing result.

As long as there is activist editing, Wikipedia cannot claim any moral high
ground vs. the PR man, because we know that many people -- including the
Anders Breiviks and Johann Haris of this world -- contribute to Wikipedia
precisely for the reason of propagating their world view.

Andreas