Wikipedia talk:Identifying PR

Latest comment: 5 years ago by Kudpung in topic Complete?
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Examples edit

It might be interesting to keep a list of examples for the skeptical that many articles actually display these hallmarks. Here's one [1]. ☆ Bri (talk) 19:06, 10 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

  • Why here's one now. The second you see a buzzword -- "flagship" -- you know this is probably PR. "Leading" pretty much verifies it. Normal people never talk like that or write like that. The easiest thing to do is to highliht about 20 words and google them. First hit is a press release and the text is the usual boilerplate found at the bottom of every company press release, with the company's flattering description of itself.

    Much of the time, you don't even need to be a COI detective or analyze the motives of the editor. Typically companies assign maintenance of "their" Wikipedia page to an intern who will make zero effort. They'll find a piece of boilerplate and copy-paste it and all you have to do is remove the copyright violation. Simple copyright covers a very big portion PR edits. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 23:29, 23 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

It might come as surprise to those who don't do a lot of new page reviewing themselves, but plenty of our 430 New Page Reviewers don't recognise these signs even if they are fairly blatant, not to mention the unqualified users who are still allowed to do preliminary patrolling and tagging. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 11:05, 24 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

Here's a doozie: Equinix "specializes in enabling global interconnection between organizations and their employees, customers, partners, data and clouds". I actually have no idea what this is supposed to mean. It ticks quite a few of the boxes in this essay too, such as press release sources, a section on sustainability, a list of operations sites, and excessive history in which they "focused on expanding interconnection from its inception". No surprise here: I found this as a probable client of a Fiverr wiki editing firm, probably Highbrows. ☆ Bri (talk) 02:39, 25 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

For naive edits, this is a great example. A college boasts that it has fax machines, brooms and water. ☆ Bri (talk) 02:33, 2 November 2017 (UTC)Reply

Engagement edit

This has been pretty self contained so far. Now that editing has leveled off, should an attempt be made with one of the other projects such as WP:WikiProject Cooperation? ☆ Bri (talk) 16:29, 26 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

Additions edit

All of these are common in good business articles, but, per your argument, commonly added by the filing editors because they it is good practice, and sometimes accepted into the articles because the current lead editors are aware of it.

  • Share prices
  • Multiple office locations. Very common.
  • Mergers and Acquisitions.
  • Share prices.
  • Year end financials.

scope_creep (talk) 19:18, 23 February 2018 (UTC)Reply

Complete? edit

When can we start linking to this essay? Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:14, 8 May 2018 (UTC)Reply