The perils of a contact link.

I got a call today 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.

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