On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 11:39 AM, Charles Matthews <
charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
On 16 November 2012 09:54, Andreas Kolbe
<jayen466(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Charles, I really am a bit mystified here. First
of all, I would echo
Tom's
point about the insider fallacy. In quality
management terms, the people
Wikipedia writes about are customers, just as readers are. That's quality
management ABC, and I can't imagine why you would contest that.
Well, ask the management of "The Sun" whether the celebs they write
about are the "customers", and they'll have a good belly-laugh. Since
I'm not interested in the "tabloid" side of WP I know what you are
saying here, but I don't think you are expressing the point. Everyone
knows that WP operates on universal principles rather than things you
find in management books.
Let's just say then that both readers and subjects have certain rightful
expectations of Wikipedia, and how well Wikipedia fulfils them is a measure
of the quality of Wikipedia's service.
Secondly, even the WMUK/CIPR guideline allows that
there is a way for PR
companies to contribute: by using the talk page
and noticeboards. At
least
those PR professionals who comply with that
guideline deserve to receive
efficient service, and there can be no intimation that what they do is in
any way improper, and had better be done by a lawyer. And if all they do
is
use talk pages and noticeboards, then they
don't have to be able to edit
within NPOV to have a right to be at the WP table. Just turning up on a
talk
page is enough. Do you disagree?
About the lawyer: I think I have been misunderstood here. I meant that
a lawyer probably has had enough training and background to deal with
the actual issues of representing a client on WP. I was not suggesting
that anyone should be using a lawyer to make legal threats and so on.
Since I was involved in the CIPR guideline draft I know what it says.
I think we (the WP community) should show a courteous face to all who
come to talk pages and elsewhere on the site needing help.
Thirdly, as Andy has pointed out, PR
professionals and employees are not
actually at present forbidden from editing Wikipedia.
I was heavily involved in drafting the COI guideline in 2006, so I
know what it says (or used to say, at least).
Until four weeks ago,
people who clicked "Contact us" to report an article problem were
presented
with one invitation after another to just go and
fix the article
themselves.
And the number of articles edited by
organisations' staff is legion. I
sometimes think a quarter of Wikipedia wouldn't exist if it weren't for
conflict-of-interest edits. They're everywhere. Pick any article on a
minor
company, musician or publication, and chances are
you'll find the
subject or
staff members in the edit history.
I think your estimate assumes too much. It would be more helpful to
understand how big the problematic sector really is.
People have PR departments, or hire PR agents, to
manage their
reputation.
That's just how it is. If they come to
Wikipedia with a justified
complaint,
Wikipedia should have a process in place that
does not require them to
edit
the article themselves, but provides them with a
reasonable level of
service, and gets things done when that's the right thing to do. There
should be no quibbling that PR professionals have no right to complain in
Wikipedia.
The "right to complain" on behalf of someone else is an innovation, I
think. And this is where I have a problem. Arrogating to ones' self
the right to complain not just about the content (which surely anyone
can do) but as representative of a particular interest is
questionable. Historically lobbyists had to wait in the lobby?
I don't think that's what you're
saying, as you say you are well aware of
the need to improved the relationship between Wikipedia and PR
professionals, but just what you *are* saying to Tom then escapes me at
the
moment.
As I said, my example of lawyers was more to do with fitness to do the
job actually required than about role.
Okay, I see what you're saying now. Lawyers are perhaps more used to
situations where they have to tell a client, You can't do that, or You
can't do it that way.
I have had a couple of interesting conversations with
people outside
the community about training PR folk to the point where they could
more fruitfully do the job of defending clients on WP. What was
interesting was that my estimate of how much training it would take
was at odds with the estimate I was being given of how long the
trainees' companies would be prepared to allow them to take off the
job. Time is money, in that sector. But we have to face this as a
practical issue, if WMUK (for example) is to move to doing workshops
with the PR sector. My actual problem comes down to this: if we are
required to teach a quick-and-dirty approach to WP editing to PR pros
who then expect simple steps to give good results, there may be
disappointment.
The supreme irony here is that Wikipedia set out to be open, in contrast to
the ivory tower of academe. Yet over the space of a decade, Wikipedia has
become so involved, and its policy so impenetrable and contradictory, that
people are now making a living from guiding others through it.
The conflation of WP and "social media" in
the PR Week online piece
shows the trouble here. WP predates social media as people now
understand it, and is fundamentally more complicated. We have to make
that point clearly in order to get progress here, and if what we get
back is based on, say, Facebook as comparison, we are not in serious
communication with the other side.
Charles
Wikipedia has one thing in common with social media: just like anyone can
register a Facebook or Twitter account and write what they like about
whoever they like or dislike, anyone can edit Wikipedia – and that really
does include anyone, regardless of fitness or motivation.
Andreas