[WikiEN-l] "Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement"

[Andreas Kolbe]

On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 10:17 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 29 March 2012 09:57, Thomas Morton <morton.thomas at googlemail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > One of those would be me :)
> > A suggestion I picked up on was to have a joint session with Wikipedians
> &
> > individuals from CREWE where we could have an actual dialogue (I sent an
> > email to Daria about getting assistance for this last night).
> > If your interested in helping out with the dialogue that would rock :)
>
>
> I've just blogged about this too:
>
>
> http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2012/03/29/the-public-relations-agency-problem/
>
> I'm hoping that will circulate slightly in the PR sphere.



Very good post. In particular, two observations stand out:

"sometimes our articles are in fact rubbish. How do you fix that?"

"my comments are strictly advisory and based on watching the press
absolutely crucify PR people who have edited clients’ articles, which
becomes bad PR for the client — even if what they did was within Wikipedia
rules and they arguably didn’t deserve it. I’ve been repeatedly amazed at
just how upset the press and the public (e.g., people I talk to) get about
this, much more than the actual Wikipedians do."

I've been amazed at this as well. Papers will say "so-and-so deleted
negative material from their own Wikipedia biography", and that's it. Crime
of the century!

In these reports, there's not a peep about what kind of negative material
the person deleted from their article – whether it was the sole reference
to a notable criminal conviction or a ridiculous 500-word diatribe about
their dispute with a neighbour in Solihull, added by a Solihull IP.

The media just seem to love the chance to take a cheap shot – one reason
why I think we give the press far too much credit as encyclopedic sources.
At any rate, they need educating.

Perhaps this a-priori assumption that if you "delete criticism" from a
Wikipedia article you must be evil is a subconscious effect of the
"encyclopedia" moniker, which makes people assume there must have been an
editorial team involved, carefully vetting and balancing all this
information.

A similar thing happens in deletion discussions. Some anonymous person
writes a hatchet job about a borderline-notable figure. The person is
horrified and complains, and an AfD or some other type of community
discussion ensues.

Naturally, never having heard of the person, and in the absence of readily
available alternative sources of information, everyone first of all reads
the Wikipedia article that the subject says is the problem.

And without really noticing, they form a mental image of the person based
on that article. The article may, as in a recent case I was involved in,
contain references to statements the subject never made, be cherry-picked
to make them look like a crank, assign vastly undue weight to the anonymous
hatchet wielder's bugbear, and so forth. But the reader laps it all up.
It's got footnotes!

And the standard Wikipedian response after perusing the article is: "Well,
this guy is complaining that our article makes him look like a crank. But
according to our article, he *is* a crank. He just doesn't like the truth."

And with that, truth is vanquished.