On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 10:14 PM, fabian@unpopular.org.uk wrote:
Hi all,
I found this a bit comical:
http://www.prweek.com/uk/news/1159206/pr-industry-blames-cumbersome-wikipedi...
They don't get it that the COI policy affects everyone.
They think that just because they want people to pay them to change the articles they should be allowed to do so!
"Ingham added that ‘too many of the people who edit Wikipedia still do not understand PR’."
"‘Too many of them continue to have the knee-jerk reaction that information from a PR professional must intrinsically be wrong.’ Ingham urged Wikipedia to implement ‘radical reform’ to its editing process."
Just because someone does not agree with you, does not mean that they do not understand you.
No-one is saying their information is intrinsically wrong, just that they should not edit articles relating to their clients.
all the best
Leuthe
That's not entirely fair, for several reasons:
Until recently, the Contact Us page and the pages you were directed to when you wanted to report a problem were an absolute maze:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Contact_us&oldid=513...
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Contact_us/Article_probl...
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Contact_us/Article_probl...
It is now vastly improved – Oliver (Ironholds) did some fantastic work on it in October, and cut out some subpages altogether – but until last month, it was a daunting task just to locate the OTRS e-mail, and on the way there you passed a prominent invitation to just "Fix it yourself."
Another problem is that OTRS can sometimes take weeks to reply. One very distressed BLP subject told me it was four weeks before he heard back. Also see this comment by Jclemens: "I've seen this happen on OTRS time and time again: real tickets about unbalanced articles do go unanswered for weeks."
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/COI...
PR people are told to leave messages on article talk pages. Problem is, these are routinely ignored for days, weeks or forever. Even if they're not, often the only editors attending are those responsible for the state of the article that caused the complaint in the first place.
On Jimbo's talk page someone just suggested using the COI noticeboard as a default location for PR people to raise concerns. I think that could work: there are regulars attending to that noticeboard, and complaints there would get outside eyes on the perceived problem, and an answer within a reasonable time frame.
Andreas