The perils of contactability.

[reddragdiva]

I got a call yesterday from someone looking for a number to call Yorkshire Television. "I put 'Yorkshire Television' into my computer, and your number came up! Why-kee-pedia." Which means he put Yorkshire Television into search, got their Wikipedia article, went through the "Contact us" link in the sidebar until he saw a UK phone number (presumably on the Foundation press page) and called me. Wouldn't believe I had nothing to do with them.

(One of my co-workers used to be in network infrastructure for the BBC. A call got through to him from someone asking him "I want you to make me a website ... You're the BBC, aren't you? ... I pay my licence fee!")

(We get contacts like this quite a lot. The link in the sidebar on English Wikipedia has been changed from "Contact us" to "Contact Wikipedia" so as to minimise people thinking it's a way to contact the subject of the article, suggested by Guillom because they did that on French Wikipedia for the same reason.)

Comments

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

Sadly, I'm all too familiar with that level of idiocy: I dealt with it at my old job at BillMatrix on a minute-to-minute basis. Most of those were the same sort of calls: after spending a half-hour explaining that while we took payments for utility companies, we didn't have customer billing information nor could we access it, most of these morons would scream some variation of "Well, cain't yew call 'em to get mah info? Ah dun feel lak waitin' on hole all day." (But they saw nothing wrong with wasting all day whining about how I should have access to it.) Somehow, they don't have time to talk to the proper people, but they have all the time in the world to argue with the poor grunt who keeps exclaiming "I'm sorry, but we don't have that information..."

[steer.livejournal.com]

Hah.. that's why you don't want your name as the contact. For a more extreme version

http://www.centos.org/modules/news/article.php?storyid=127

[utile-et-dulce.livejournal.com]

bit of a classic that one!

[unagothae.livejournal.com]

O.O

Just when I think I'm beginning to over-estimate the stupidity of the general public, I get a reminder that I have, in fact, grossly under-estimated it!

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Most people aren't that stupid; it's just that the ones who are tend to make themselves very visible sometimes...

[richgoth.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't believe I had nothing to do with them.
ugh... the story of my life! I get calls ranging from missing persons to noisy neighbours... The proportion of mentally challenged people in the community is greatly underestimated!

[(Anonymous)]

You need a full page splash that's robots.txt'ed that says "do you want to talk to someone from Wikipedia about Wikipedia right now, or would you rather have a $beverage*.

Also, that pales in comparison to this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mojo_Jojo

*nationally appropriate, obviously, from IP logging. Tea, coffee, beer, blood...

[reddragdiva]

o_0 That's really quite special indeed.