Is it just me or did anyone else read "promotional" as "p*rnotional" and do a double take? I really need to avoid the internet before 9:00 AM (not that it will make any big difference in how alert I am, haha). As for the response by "This!", (King George III impression as in Hamilton) Awesome, wow. Is that sort of response common from people and companies that try to pull off this sort of BS? Tube·of·Light03:18, 27 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I haven't really asked that many. I tried sending something similar to Burger King, who had replaced the entire lead of the Whopper article with adverting text that was meant to be read by Alexa or some home bot set off by a 30 second TV commercial. There wasn't a direct email address available for the head marketing guy, so he may have never got the message, but he didn't answer when the story got into Adverising Age and about 10 similar publications. The advertising industry gave him an award. Some folks think "I don't care what you say about me as long as you mention my product and spell my name right." I consider that to be a testable hypothesis. Smallbones(smalltalk)00:35, 28 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Wow, turns out BK just loves controversial advertising (link to USA Today). I really don't know what is the most surprising part to me, the fact that BK thought this would be even remotely okay, or the fact that even Google was taking action against this, or the fact that BK got an award for this. BTW, did you use 5 tildes instead of 4 when signing, Smallbones? Tube·of·Light03:48, 28 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The Kosinsky case is a sad breach of trust of the community, and raises questions about whether the best-intentioned users involved in such projects or perhaps Wikimidians-in-residence may fall into a Stockholm syndrome-like situation or simply lower themselves to corrupt opportunism when placed in such key positions. I'm not sure what exactly we can do other than encourage community oversight of people in these positions. -Indy beetle (talk) 10:20, 27 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think it's accurate to say that the YouTube comments, instead of "blaming Wikipedia for being unreliable, easily manipulated and totally corrupt", had "quite a positive bent". The top comment, with 4.2K upvotes (ten times as many as the comment quoted by the Signpost above), says, "I can hear some teacher from my school now saying 'I told you, Wikipedia doesn't count as a source.' I can feel the sound waves." --AndreasJN46619:48, 27 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
That's true, but I really would have expected all comments tk be negative, in the vein of "you trust what you read on Wikipedia?" That anyone at all in YouTube comments came to our defense was quite unexpected for me, already. Zarasophos (talk) 23:01, 27 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed. It was a much more positive set of comments than I've come across about Wikipedia elsewhere. The top comment is one of the largest cliches about Wikipedia, but not one of the most wrong. (And of course, the response is: no, you can't cite Wikipedia as a secondary source in a serious work, but you can use it as part of the research process, particularly as a way to find reliable references.) — Bilorv (talk) 14:08, 29 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I'll just note that Bri really wanted the blurb to be "Schmutziges Wikipedia-Geheimnis", ("filthy wiki-secret") which is a quote from the comedian. If I could have figured out a way to properly attribute the quote in a video in a foreign language in a blurb (on the Table of contents page) to avoid BLP/quote attribution problems, I'd have seriously considered it. Now that's a schmutziges Wikipedia-Geheimnis. Smallbones(smalltalk)00:02, 28 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
← Back to Disinformation report