Proposal talk:Hire brand ambassadors

I think you should provide a lot more detail for this proposal. I can't support it until it is fleshed out. --Bodnotbod 16:12, 18 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipe-tan cosplayers!

Maybe sports figures can represent the brand better, but I doubt it. 99.56.136.133 06:37, 24 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Impact?

Some proposals will have massive impact on end-users, including non-editors. Some will have minimal impact. What will be the impact of this proposal on our end-users? -- Philippe 00:10, 3 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure, it seems like it might be more of a feel-good measure than anything with a hugely positive impact, but there is only one way to find out! 99.35.129.22 17:30, 3 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Hmmm, I think you're implying that the only way to find out the impact is to do it; I'm not sure that's true. We can look at the experience of other companies who have done this type of thing, there are surely marketing studies; can you find any data? -- Philippe 17:36, 3 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

There are simply too many firsts of the Wikimedia Foundation: it started with an open tertiary source which was the first to have benefited from enough popularity to be available to more than half the world population. What other companies who have hired brand ambassadors in that position could there be? Jesse Jackson, Julian Bond, and Michael Jordan endorsed Encarta Africana. To be perfectly honest, I think the media would have a field day with it, which only makes this question more important: What if they were instructed to read from the results of Category:Proposals for outreach text? This is actually a difficult and interesting decision. On one hand, we could have an opportunity to increase editor participation beyond what a more normal sigmoid would have looked like after 2007. On the other hand, everyone could laugh at us, and people like Weird Al and Steven Colbert could resume attacks on content quality. I am so glad this is not my call because I know I would go for it. Honestly, I'd probably devote 5% of the budget to this kind of thing. I'd be on Craigslist: "Major Sports figures and Wikipe-tan look-alikes wanted, must be able to help people find the peer-reviewed secondary literature." The worst case scenario is they're all accused of macking with Jimbo or something, which when you compare worst case scenarios of any organization with a military or para-military, is pretty mild as scandals go. The best case scenario is that we approximately double the number of active editors able to make decisions about content dispute in accordance with the secondary lit. I see no possible net negative here. 99.191.73.2 00:15, 14 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Pick carefully

en:Stephen Fry interviewed Jimmy during one of his TV series and was very positive about wikipedia. If we could get him to be an ambassador that would be quite something. But it needs to be someone like him who the public respect for their intellect and knowledge. WereSpielChequers 15:39, 5 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]