[Wikipedia-l] On press releases and boasting

Sat Oct 2 22:56:03 UTC 2004

On Sat, 02 Oct 2004 17:41:43 +0200, Elisabeth Bauer <elian at djini.de> wrote:
> Daniel Mayer wrote:
> 
> > Two words: PRESS RELEASE!
> >
> > Seriously, once the fund drive is over we should have a press release about
> > this and also mention the fact and result of our 'recent successful fund
> > drive.' We should also quote Jimbo when he said that commercial encyclopedias
> > will be out of business in 5 years if they keep doing as they have been.
>
> I'm not entirely sure if it's a good idea to send a separate press
> release. We discussed this yesterday among the german wikipedians,
> feelings were mixed.

Well, it would be combined with other notices for the coming week.
But this professional content test (and it would not be a bad idea to
commission more of the same) is more newsworthy than the 
successful completion of our fundraiser. 

> Please let's stick to "we are a project building an encyclopedia" 
> and let the media do the job of praising us. They do it quite well, as we
> can see. Let's mention the c't test discreetly in future press releases
> (like the one about the fund raising drive), but not send a separate one.
>
< If we pick up the results of this test and boast about them,
< we will be measured by this in the future. Closed season would be
< over for us. 

Modesty is never out of fashion.  And if there were any chance that we 
would somehow stop improving, stop growing, and end up looking silly
alongside the other great encyclopedias, it might be appropriate to be
embarrassed that c't happened to catch us on a good day.

But they didn't just catch us on a good day.  I would welcome a 
hundred tests like this, by people far less friendly to us than the c't 
experts (although I suspect that this test was at least a single-blind 
study).  To pretend that this test was not a big deal would be to do
ourselves a disservice.  This is the kind of content test we want 
people doing, all the time, rather than inserting vandalism and 
seeing how long it takes for it to be reverted.  

My initial post was intentionally outrageous, but is it boasting 
to announce the results of our first third-party "taste test"?  The 
results speak for themselves; however gracefully we respond 
to this initial content test, closed season is already closing. 

> For the german wikipedia, we are planning to mention the test results in
> our next press release about the publication of the wikipedia cd version.

For when is that planned?  

I hope you will discuss some of these issues - including what to title the 
next press release and what to emphasize in it - on the meta: page 
itself, with links to related discussions about the german press releases.
  http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/PR/Content-test

-- 
+sj+