[Foundation-l] We really need to avoid the next Microsoft-Wikipedia bad publicity storm

Wed Jan 31 13:43:14 UTC 2007

On 31/01/07, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/31/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> > I got a call yesterday from a press officer for a major UK bank. My
> > number was one of the few contact numbers they could find.
> > They spent lots of time yesterday morning adding stuff to the bank's
> > article from their websites and having it reverted as a copyright
> > violation. They couldn't work out what she was doing wrong, so they
> > called me. They hadn't heard about the Microsoft mess at all. Oh dear.

> Eh normally that kind of person doesn't have permission to release the
> companies property under the GFDL.

Yes, and I pointed that out too! That submitting it under GFDL means a
loss of control over the material. And to be really sure they wanted
to do that.

> How pragmatic are you prepared to be? From a purely PR viewpoint It
> doesn't matter so much if a minor company screws up.
> Thus we are only interested in making sure major companies have some
> way to make contact.
> One approach would be to launch a new service for them to moan at us
> and see if we can get mentioned in the various trade magazines (there
> is a
> Financial Director magazine I assume there is a PR person magazine)
> Try and directly mention it to as many of the fortune 500, FTSE 200,
> whatever the equiv is for other countries companies as possible.
> Probably going to have to throw in most media groups as well.
> This should get the word out while keeping the whole thing as focused
> on the group we are interested in as possible.

Heh, maybe.

You can be sure word will get out and every malcontent on teh intarweb
will flood it with complaints about their Time Tetrahedron article.
But anyway.

> As I said before your best bet for recruiting is to go and ask newbie
> admins directly on their talk pages and see if any sensible people
> have failed RFA of late

Ah yes, sorry, I forgot *ahem*

> (has the side benefit of annoying the RFA
> regulars).

:-D

> > (I'm tempted to submit this to Ask Slashdot for ideas ... any objections?)

> You think you will be able to pick them out between the the anti
> Microsoft rants and the fights between the pro and anti wikipedians?

I would happily look through 500 comments of stupid if the right idea
is lurking in there. I don't expect anyone else to ...

> Remember whatever we do we can't stop companies being stupid.

Indeed. "Whoops, you hit the electric fence. Better not do that. Do
this instead."

- d.