[WikiEN-l] Yet another PR company busted ... apparently it's all our fault

[Ken Arromdee]

On Mon, 12 Nov 2012, David Gerard wrote:
> The industry response? An apparently unanimous "our bad behaviour is
> totally Wikipedia's fault":
>
>  http://www.prweek.com/uk/news/1159206/pr-industry-blames-cumbersome-wikipedia-finsbury-editing-issue/
>
> Guys, this really doesn't help your case.

Doesn't it?  I've said for a while that paid editing is often similar to BLP
editing.  (And this one seems especially similar since it is indeed about
a living person, not a company.)  If the guy himself had come onto Wikipedia
and done exactly the same thing himself that he hired someone to do, we
might think his edits were bad but we wouldn't be complaining about his
temerity in making them at all.  It's basically a BLP except the guy is making
the edits through an intermediary.  Now, whether this is a justified or
unjustified BLP edit depends on the details, but it sounds like a completely
typical BLP subject complaint, and normally BLP subjects who edit like this
are supposed to be treated with respect.

And wikipedia is just not good at 1) making it easy for people to fix their
own BLPs (or their own company's article) or 2) getting such things fixed at
all.

When they say that Wikipedia's proces for fixing articles is "opaque,
time-consuming and cumbersome", they are *correct*.