Talk:Draft best practice guidelines for PR: Difference between revisions
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Please use this page to discuss the draft guidelines. Please comment in good faith! --[[User:Stevie Benton|Stevie Benton]] ([[User talk:Stevie Benton|talk]]) 17:15, 14 May 2012 (UTC) | Please use this page to discuss the draft guidelines. Please comment in good faith! --[[User:Stevie Benton|Stevie Benton]] ([[User talk:Stevie Benton|talk]]) 17:15, 14 May 2012 (UTC) | ||
== Volunteer time is precious == | |||
One thing I'd want to see added to anything PR people have to read, regardless of what policies we have on Wikimedia projects is simply this... | |||
Volunteer time is precious. Wikipedia {{w|WP:BACKLOG|backlogs}} are ''enormous'', and there's a strong feeling in the community that there aren't enough volunteers to cover the amount of work that needs doing: the number of administrators isn't growing to handle the backlogs and we tend to find ways to ''increase'' the amount of work we have to do. | |||
Most volunteers come to Wikipedia to work on interesting encyclopedic topics. That might be some very academic topic like economics or psychology or literature, or some more geeky topic like trains. PR people need to be aware that the volunteers they are dealing with came to Wikipedia with no desire to spend their time dealing with PR people or other paid corporate representatives. Most Wikipedians would rather be spending their time reading up on and editing on Victorian poets or obscure military leaders or the history of political ideologies or the Roman history of some small English town than having to deal with PR people. | |||
Even on the more meta side: if I'm going to spend however many hours training someone to edit Wikipedia (or fixing their errors or cleaning up after them in the administrative processes or whatever), and that person is going to go off and write articles about military history or Lady Gaga singles or whatever, that's fine. That's a valuable use of my time. Spending the same amount of my time teaching a PR person, even if they are nice and enlightened and grok the whole markets-are-conversations Cluetrain stuff, it's still a waste of time to train them on how to edit Wikipedia as the most we are going to get out of it are improvements to client articles. | |||
Even the good PR people can be a massive timesink and distraction from the primary work that Wikipedians are doing, namely building an encyclopedia. This may be misguided of me, but I don't think it's irrational: if the community are being asked to collectively and individually put time and resources into helping and working with PR people, it's perfectly reasonable to ask what are we getting out of it? —[[User:Tom Morris|Tom Morris]] ([[User talk:Tom Morris|talk]]) 18:09, 14 May 2012 (UTC) | |||
Revision as of 19:09, 14 May 2012
Please use this page to discuss the draft guidelines. Please comment in good faith! --Stevie Benton (talk) 17:15, 14 May 2012 (UTC)
Volunteer time is precious
One thing I'd want to see added to anything PR people have to read, regardless of what policies we have on Wikimedia projects is simply this...
Volunteer time is precious. Wikipedia backlogs are enormous, and there's a strong feeling in the community that there aren't enough volunteers to cover the amount of work that needs doing: the number of administrators isn't growing to handle the backlogs and we tend to find ways to increase the amount of work we have to do.
Most volunteers come to Wikipedia to work on interesting encyclopedic topics. That might be some very academic topic like economics or psychology or literature, or some more geeky topic like trains. PR people need to be aware that the volunteers they are dealing with came to Wikipedia with no desire to spend their time dealing with PR people or other paid corporate representatives. Most Wikipedians would rather be spending their time reading up on and editing on Victorian poets or obscure military leaders or the history of political ideologies or the Roman history of some small English town than having to deal with PR people.
Even on the more meta side: if I'm going to spend however many hours training someone to edit Wikipedia (or fixing their errors or cleaning up after them in the administrative processes or whatever), and that person is going to go off and write articles about military history or Lady Gaga singles or whatever, that's fine. That's a valuable use of my time. Spending the same amount of my time teaching a PR person, even if they are nice and enlightened and grok the whole markets-are-conversations Cluetrain stuff, it's still a waste of time to train them on how to edit Wikipedia as the most we are going to get out of it are improvements to client articles.
Even the good PR people can be a massive timesink and distraction from the primary work that Wikipedians are doing, namely building an encyclopedia. This may be misguided of me, but I don't think it's irrational: if the community are being asked to collectively and individually put time and resources into helping and working with PR people, it's perfectly reasonable to ask what are we getting out of it? —Tom Morris (talk) 18:09, 14 May 2012 (UTC)