[Wikipedia-l] Re: On press releases and boasting

Sun Oct 3 03:49:37 UTC 2004

Sj wrote:

>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. 
>
On this one, I agree with Elian. I doubt that a press release of this 
nature would have much impact because we haven't done anything worth 
mentioning (completing the fundraiser precipitated by our last press 
release doesn't qualify), this is something somebody else did. The best 
time to send a press release is when *we ourselves* have done something 
newsworthy. And if the wikipedians on de: are skeptical about the value 
of a press release here, when the test relates specifically to them, I 
think that's a pretty good indication for the rest of us. An alternative 
idea might be to play this up as part of a rollout for whatever new 
quality control system we develop - as in "Look how good we already are, 
now we're getting better".

By the way, as we wrap up the fundraiser portion, let me take this 
opportunity to again thank everyone who worked on the last press 
release. There are too many names to list, and some weren't logged in 
anyway, but to anyone who helped write, translate, or distribute the 
press release - Great work! I think the resulting press coverage has 
been about as good as we could have hoped for, as the 1,000,000-article 
milestone got mentioned on numerous websites and in quite a few print 
newspapers and magazines, including a widely reprinted AP story. While I 
don't understand every language, I was able to decipher that the 
coverage spread across quite a few different languages, which is even 
better.

And now, time to get back to work on improving the encyclopedia, so that 
this amounts to more than just our 15 minutes of fame.

--Michael Snow