[WikiEN-l] WP:AFD and public relations

Fri Jan 27 13:51:44 UTC 2006

"David Gerard" wrote

>Feel free to stay in self-righteous denial about a PR nightmare.

My past experience, not always but sometimes, is that phrases like "PR 
nightmare" can be used as a smokescreen for doing the 'wrong thing'. As in: 
why are we not doing the 'right thing' here?  Well, it would be a 'PR 
nightmare'.  Or in other words, having maturity enough to get round to 
admitting the organisation is fallible makes image management harder.  (Of 
course, image management for an organisation that is infallible is like 
falling off a log.)

To get back to WP and David's point, which is not invalid by any stretch of 
the imagination, we should continue to delete pages about living people that 
are clearly self-promotional rather than informative.  We actually cannot 
screen out the creation of such pages, so we have to delete them.  We 
enfranchise anyone who can type, so there is going to be some juvenilia 
posted.  Our PR line actually must factor that in: we are not EB, you don't 
have to have an office in a prestigious academic institution for your 
opinion about what goes in WP to matter to _us_.  So, yeah, some ignorant 
things are said.  But, look, who exactly is fighting to combat ignorance on 
such a broad and accessible front, as of January 2006?

I agree with David that people should be calm, cool and collected as they go 
about their business; and with Morven that profanity has not very much to do 
with achieving that aim.

Charles 