Talk:Draft best practice guidelines for PR

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. Nobody wakes up and thinks "you know what I want to do today? I want to ensure that Edelman's clients are fairly represented on Wikipedia!". 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)

(Tom asked me to look this over in my capacity as "en.wp admin who is not all that hostile to PR people and sometimes even tolerates them!" I'm not a member of WMUK, just an opinionated American.) I think the core of what Tom's saying here, that PR professionals should remember that volunteer time is valuable, is good. It is absolutely the case that, even among those of us who are willing to work with "paid editors", we're still not getting paid for helping them do a job that they are billing for. However, the point of this, as far as offering it as guidance to PR people, should not be "we hate you, stay away", or even "you're a waste of time, but we're nice enough to put up with you." It should be, "Our time is valuable too. Please spend some of the time you're being paid for anyway familiarizing yourself with the way Wikipedia actually works, so that we don't have to spend the time we're not being paid for repeating to you beginner's stuff that anyone who wants to touch Wikipedia ought to know."

To that end, one of the first steps in any set of best practices we provide to PR professionals should instruct them to read our guidelines. Obviously, just a blanket "read our rules" isn't going to be all that helpful - we have so many policies, guidelines, and essays that I doubt even the most experienced WP admin can say they've read all of them - so what we're (you're) going to want to do is lay out those policies that are most relevant to the issues PR professionals are going to be addressing. At a minimum, I'd say that prior to their first edit, all PR professionals who want to interact with Wikipedia should be reading: WP:5P, WP:COI, WP:NPOV, WP:RS, WP:COPYVIO, WP:NOT, WP:USERNAME, and WP:TALK. Many of these are neatly encapsulated in en:Wikipedia:Plain and simple conflict of interest guide, and that's a very good jumping-off point, but people who want to use us in the course of their work really ought to do us at least the courtesy of reading through all the actual policies.

The key thing I want to distill from Tom's comment, really, is that PR people may perceive us as a means to an end, and that's not always a hanging offense if they're willing to work with our rules in the process. However, if they want to make use of our encyclopedia space and our users' expertise, it's their responsibility to come into that having done their homework. We're here (those of us who are willing to work with PR people) to assist and guide them, not to do their jobs for them, and one of the best things they can do to represent "PR people" as an industry to us is to show us that they're willing to do their work themselves, not splatter some press releases on a page and wait for us to fix it up. The trade-off, the "what we get out of it" when they do things right is that we get high-quality, comprehensive content that's being provided to us, with only minimal assistance and guidance by our volunteers. Fluffernutter (talk) 18:37, 14 May 2012 (UTC)

I wrote this and then had an edit conflict. I think Fluffernutter also makes some good points which I hadn't considered

I agree with Tom's remarks. All sorts of problems apply. Cash donations sound good, but would they compromise independence. Should we make Wikipedia a w:en:supportive selling environment - I don't think so. Having had a brief skim through, I already find my hackels rising:

• "There is also conflicting advice within the Wikipedia community" - what "conflict" - what there actually is constitutes a range of views as you would expect in a community. We are not a corporation and a lot of this draft is trying to bang us into that sort of square hole.
• "Wales tells PR professionals not to edit directly but a small concession on the FAQ on a Wikipedia page . . ." OK, but it would be nice if they put in some interwiki links rather than expecting people to hunt stuff down. Also it is not a small concession but an alternative opinion. We are not a corporation!
• "The CIPR needs to work with Wikipedians to define what is meant by “minor” edits." I do not see why we need to this: if there is any doubt then it's not a minor edit, straightforward eh?
• "And others, such as Lord Bell, believe just because PR professionals are paid advocates, it doesn’t mean they are “lying”4 and not in a position to edit effectively." This is classic strawman argument (worthy of an edit war!). It is not whether paid advocates are lying, it is the matter of being biased. Also as being constrained by contractual obligations - whether as a direct employee or through another form of contract - everything they do takes place within the context of these additional legal factors which do not affect other editors, who are acting as free individuals. I do not think wikipedians want or need to be weighed down by a whole series of extra considerations when dealing with fellow wikipedians.

In the end perhaps professionals from the PR industry should consider whether its a simple matter that wikipedia is not their cup of tea ("its consumption is strongly associated with a calm but alert and focused, relatively productive (alpha wave dominant), mental state in humans") while at work, and just give it a miss. Perhaps they should reconcile their concerns with the epithet "no-one trusts wikipedia anyway" and edit pages on Startrek or Napoleonic militaryt uniforms when they are not at work.Leutha (talk) 19:17, 14 May 2012 (UTC)

Comment from Charles Matthews

Needs to be completely rewritten. Really. Anything to do with "conflict of interest" in the Wikipedia sense has to be handled in precise language. 86.6.26.208 20:05, 14 May 2012 (UTC)

In more detail: the five pillars are not the key thing here. Neutrality and verifiability are. Linking to pages categorised as "basic information" is not really enough. The actual wording of the neutrality matters greatly. 86.6.26.208 20:33, 14 May 2012 (UTC)

Basic confusion. A noticeboard is not a WikiProject. 86.6.26.208 20:38, 14 May 2012 (UTC)

I think the talk about "escalation" is potentially misleading. Certainly the first thing to do is to document an issue on a relevant Talk page, and/or use the OTRS system (the info@ email address). It is significant that OTRS is manned by volunteers. Then it is a question of getting outside involvement. The BLP noticeboard is a reasonable route in the case of information about living people (which need not be in a biography). An editor active on the page in question is a good person to discuss with, or an uninvolved admin. I don't think Jimmy Wales's Talk page is a solution that scales, however tempting it is to think that dealing with the top guy is the right approach. What you need usually is an experienced old Wikipedia hand who isn't moved by "noise". Dispute resolution, which is what comes next should be avoided, and it is unlikely that a case involving PR editing would get to the ArbCom. AN/I is the place for getting rough-and-ready community action in quite bad cases of edit warring. 86.6.26.208 20:50, 14 May 2012 (UTC)