Wikipedia talk:Press releases/May 2004

Press release: Wikipedia wins 8th Annual Webby Award for Best Community

Originally at the village pump

I think we should have a press release to announce our Webby Award success. I've started one at Wikipedia:Press releases/May 2004. Please add to it. Other sites such as Google and the BBC have made press releases when they have won in the past, so I feel it's important we do too. We haven't had one for over three months, and the last one received little attention in the outside world. Perhaps this one will have more of an effect. Angela. 17:03, May 12, 2004 (UTC)

Good idea. I don't feel in the mood to write PR copy right now (I actually have in the past), but I left some things I could see adding on the talk page. Niteowlneils 01:46, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

This has been five days now. Should it be sent? Or is there not enough interest to bring it up to a sendable standard? Angela. 19:35, May 17, 2004 (UTC)

I look at it and find myself at a loss -- how to describe community practices? And I think all the work we went to last time sending out PRs only to get virtually zero response makes it harder to get pepped up. :-) What work needs to be done to get it in shape -- does it need all the expansion it currently indicates, or will it be fine with simply some quotes from Jimmy and a little expansion in key areas? Jwrosenzweig 19:42, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

Part of this is that the idea is that the Webby should be a publicity boost to us in itself. With the weight that the award has.

I think the normal wikipedia editing practise is very poorly suited to editing a press release. We wan't to make it express a pointed crisp viewpoint; ours. And we want it to be a stylistically uniform polished text. Not a work in progress, nor NPOV.

Having a clear person whose responsibility it is to deal with public relations in general, would be a very good idea. I can envision the Board of Trustees appointing a Public Relations Officer pretty soon after they start their work.

Also, personally I think our press releases should be about us, not about what others think of us, but that is a personal leaning. -- Cimon 16:50, May 18, 2004 (UTC)

end of moved village pump discussion

Shameless self promotion

Maybe it's just me, but my head hurts when I to try to go from NPOV mode to shameless self promotion, PR mode. Fuzheado 00:29, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

Ideas

• I don't feel like writing it, at least at the moment, but there's probably something to be said about Wikipedia:Meetup/http://wikipedia.meetup.com/. Also, maybe get more specific about consensus, especially in contrast to the more common 'majority rules'. Oh, and #wikipedia. Possibly work in Jimbo's upcoming European tour. Niteowlneils 01:43, 13 May 2004 (UTC)
  • Jimbo's European PR tour I can see, the rest gets just too wordy for an article about an award. Someone being introduced doesn't need to know too many details, or that some Wikipedians are saying hi to each other, though that would be more relevant with a win in the Community category. -- user:zanimum

• Shouldn't there be a link to something about the GNU Free Documentation License? A lot of readers of the press realease would likely had never heard of it before. I would "edit boldly", but this is a press release, so I'm feeling a bit timid. ;-) Khym Chanur 01:56, May 13, 2004 (UTC)
  • It's only a draft press release, so be bold. :) Angela. 07:52, May 13, 2004 (UTC)

Unlike the rest of Wikimedia's content, the text of this press release is placed into the public domain.

Just before the release of the last one, I managed to convince mav that this last line is unhelpful as it gives a misleading impression that the content is not free (the nuance will be lost on rapid-reading editors). Can we change it (or perhaps simply remove it) this time? Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 08:28, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

I removed it. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 10:59, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

I don't know if this is a useful factoid, but we are coming close to getting ten million hits on google. -- 213.243.182.62 05:06, 15 May 2004 (UTC)

Will this evetually make it to meta so that other language Wikipedias can copy and translate it? Dori | Talk 21:44, May 17, 2004 (UTC)

It's linked to from meta. I just thought that it would get more attention here, but it hasn't had a great deal anyway. I don't see why the other languages can't have their own version. It's not like they have to translate the English one, so I didn't feel it needed to be on Meta as other languages could develop independently from this one. Angela. 01:54, May 18, 2004 (UTC)

OK, I just had some thought of ant feeling left out and being depressed again :) Dori | Talk 04:08, May 18, 2004 (UTC)

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Five word acceptance speech

So has anyone given any thought to what we should have as the five word acceptance speech? It would be appropriate to determine the five words by wiki means. Fuzheado 00:14, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

Last year's acceptance speeches show they are often related to the sites, rather than to the awards themselves ("Read all views -- Google News" for example), so we could have something like "You can edit this page". Angela. 01:04, May 19, 2004 (UTC)

Angela, I like that. I was also thinking of "neutral point of view works" Fuzheado 01:12, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

I would definitely go with "You can edit this page". It communicates more to people who haven't actually explored Wikipedia yet, while talking about neutral point of view assumes at least a little prior knowledge of what we're doing here. --Michael Snow 17:13, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

Or mabey, "Edit this Acceptance Speech, please". Although "You can edit this page" will work extremly well too. KirbyMeister 14:19, 23 May 2004 (UTC)

The problem is that with MediaWiki 1.3, it appears "Edit this page" no longer is a button or phrase that is used. There is only an "Edit" tab, which I think is less obvious. Fuzheado | Talk 22:53, 27 May 2004 (UTC)

No longer true - Centrx 17:57, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)

"Neutrality of acceptance speech disputed." is really, REALLY funny! KirbyMeister 17:46, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)

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Acceptance speech suggestions

• "You can edit this page"
• "Neutral point of view works"
• "One big cyber ant colony"
• "Harnessing the power of perverts" (er, inside joke re: Bomis and Wikipedia)
• "Edit this page right now"
• "The best encyclopedia bar none"
• "Half million pages and counting"
• "Donate; We need more servers"
• "An encyclopedia in fifty languages"
• "Wikipedia kicks Britannica's scrawny ass"
• "sp fmt rm tyop lk"
• "Open source is the way"
• "Open source encyclopedia; editors everywhere"
• "Wikipedia - everything you ever needia"
• "Wikipedia - nothing rhymes with it"
• "We don't do short entries"
• "You, too, can help write"
• "Information wants to be Free!"
• "A great encyclopedia and community"
• "Freedom of Information Art Squared" Neutrality 02:08, 22 May 2004 (UTC)
• "Revert b/c award is POV" Neutrality 02:09, 22 May 2004 (UTC)
• "1,000,000 editor-hours -- thank you!!"
• "To our 50,000 editors: Bravo!"
• "Edit this free encyclo pedia"
• "This speech is a stub."
• "Neutrality of acceptance speech disputed."

So, what happened?

Well, is the press release now ready to be press released? Or is it just that everyone's just so excited about the new servers and stuff that everyone forgot about it? --Vikingstad 22:44, May 27, 2004 (UTC)

Copyedits

"...competing against sites such as Friendster and Livejournal.com..."

This use of the "such as", introducing samples of a class, relates Friendster and Livejournal as examples of "sites", so putting Dictionary.com in here would be as valid as including the other actually nominated community sites, whereas "like" relates Friendster and Livejournal as one of some "sites" that are similar to Wikipedia. In other words, here are the full meanings of the two cases, as they would stand. The first is "...competing against sites such as Friendster and Livejournal.com...", the last is ""...competing against sites like Friendster and Livejournal.com...":

Wikipedia announced today that it had won a Webby Award for Best Community. It competed against websites, examples of which are Dictionary.com and Yahoo!.

Wikipedia announced today that it had won a Webby Award for Best Community. It competed against other community-oriented sites like Friendster and Livejournal.

A way to use "such as" so that the meaning is correctly that of the latter example would be as follows:

Wikipedia announced today that it had won a Webby Award for Best Community, competing against other community-oriented sites, such as Friendster and Livejournal.

However, this is redundant because, if Wikipedia is competing in the Best Community category then the other sites are of course community-oriented, so using "such as" would not be appropriate. As for like, the range of similitude includes sameness proper. It does not so strictly mean that, because Wikipedia competed against sites "like" Friendster and Livejournal, it could not have competed against those very sites. Using "like" in this way may not be the best construction, but it is better than using "such as" in this way. So, if there's a better construction, go for it.

As for comprising, in this sense it means more "include", "comprehend", or "contain", which are all faces of the same coin. The key is, though, that it overwhelmingly means the action of containing, rather than the fact of there being containment. So, "...a diverse organization comprising nearly five hundred leading experts..." would be one which is currently embracing or containing within it five hundred experts. A discourse comprises some subject of study; walls comprise parts of a fort; a Wikipedian comprises facts in an article. But, in the sense "to be composed of" or "to consist of", the passive sense is proper. For instance, here are two examples from the OED: "Many of these words are comprised of monemes.", "The voluntary boards of management, comprised..of very zealous and able laymen." Upon further consideration, however, I think that it would be better to remove the comprising entirely, and replace it with, simply: "...a diverse organization of nearly five hundred leading experts...".

- Centrx 23:06, 28 May 2004 (UTC)