Dear Andreas, We need to remember that this is a volunteer driven process,
and the commodity in short supply is volunteer time not PR professionals
time. Encouraging PR people to forum shop by raising the same thing in
multiple venues is disrespectful of the community, it also risks damaging
things for the PR flacks as the temptation would be to ignore them as they
are likely to have raised things elsewhere. What we should be doing is
advising them of the best place to go with their problem, and the best way
to escalate things if that doesn't work. The confict of Interest
noticeboard is not usually going to be appropriate for them, as it says:
"Post here if you are concerned that an editor has a COI, and is using
Wikipedia to promote their own interests at the expense of
neutrality"<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:NPOV>.
Where a Living person is being misreported then the BLP noticeboard is an
option for escalation. But encouraging PR flacks to forum shop is not going
to be part of a workable solution. We need to work with the grain of the
community and that means understanding that forum shoppers get short shrift.

As for the idea that all PR complaints should be responded to within 24
hours, that would have the effect of prioritising the updating of a company
article to name a company's new chair above dealing with a case of cyber
bullying in a school playground. I suspect that most of us would take the
ethical line that dealing with cyber bullying gets priority over a slightly
out of date business article. Yes it would be good to know how quick OTRS
is, and if OTRS needs additional volunteers, but if OTRS needs to
prioritise anything it should be serious issues above less serious ones,
and some business related issues will be more urgent than others. I would
be surprised if OTRS doesn't already have some such prioritisation system,
if only that volunteers will concentrate on the urgent stuff.

WSC

On 14 November 2012 00:00, Andreas Kolbe <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 11:24 PM, Paul Wilkinson <
> [email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Dear Andreas
>> Francis Ingham is DG of the PRCA. Its fee-paying members include RLM
>> Finsbury (among other WPP companies), so, ultimately, it contributes to his
>> salary. Possible COI?
>>
>> Paul
>>
>
>
> Come on, you are a CIPR fellow, and CIPR and PRCA are rival bodies. In
> fact, Ingham used to be the CIPR's assistant director, until he defected to
> the PRCA. Shall I make an ad-hominem comment based on your COI too?
>
> Yes, Finsbury is one of several hundred members of PRCA. Even so Ingham
> did not condone their behaviour. And what he says about the poor perception
> of PR professionals is the same thing CIPR have said (and according to
> Wikipedia, it's one thing CIPR and PRCA agree on, and have collaborated on).
>
> The question is not, does the man have a COI; the question is, Is there
> merit in what he says?
>
> And there is. Oliver's revamp of the Contact Us pages has made a huge
> difference, because previously, PR professionals would pass three
> invitations to fix the article themselves before they would come to the
> OTRS e-mail address.
>
> But there is still room for improvement. OTRS e-mails should be responded
> to the same day, not up to four weeks later. Is anyone collecting data on
> how quickly OTRS mails are responded to? Are those data public? If not,
> there is another potential area for improvement.
>
> PR professionals could be invited to post to the COI noticeboard AND the
> article talk page at the same time (leaving a link on the article talk page
> to the COIN discussion), so they get a prompt response. There should be a
> discussion whether PR professionals should be forbidden or encouraged to
> contribute to COI noticeboard queries where they do not have a COI
> themselves beyond being PR professionals too. These are some ideas.
>
> Andreas
>
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