Some people think that Wikipedia is the sum of all human knowledge. With 9.25 million articles it is certainly big and the fact that anyone (supposedly) can add to this store of knowledge should make the content exhaustive and authoritative. There are several articles in Wikipedia that I was a central player in. And from my expert position I can see the flaws in these articles:
- Liverpool Software Gazette. This was my idea. I published and funded it and edited several issues.
- Imagine Software Where I was Operations Director in charge of sales and marketing, inter alia.
- Codemasters. Where I was one of the first employees and was in charge of marketing, inter alia.
- Dizzy. The repeatedly chart topping game brand which I did the marketing for.
So I thought that it would be good to apply my intimate knowledge of these subjects by contributing to Wikipedia. I had already written articles involving all four subjects and those articles are on this blog. So the simplest thing was to add the permalink for those articles to the External Links section of the Wikipedia entries. Then anyone researching could drill down and get the extra knowledge. So:
- This article (perhaps the weakest) explains the context in the late 70s in Liverpool that led to me creating Liverpool Software Gazette.
- This article chronicles the story of the Megagames and the demise of Imagine. This adds very considerably to the weak Wikipedia entry.
- This article is about the early years at Codemasters and the budget games on which the company was founded. It contains much unique inside knowledge on what the market was like at the time and how Codemasters succeeded.
- Finally this article is all about the history of Dizzy and the events and people behind that history. It has been well received by the Olivers and the Dizzy community.
You would think this is what Wikipedia is all about. People who are experts on a subject adding their knowledge to the collected expertise of the encyclopedia. So you may be surprised to find that the editors deleted these entries. I wasn’t, though, I had already been warned that the Wikipedia editors are now a destructive force standing in the way of knowledge. That deletions of quality expert additions is now the norm and that a lot of people have given up trying.
Which is a great pity. The enormous problem that Wikipedia has is that it is a monopoly and like all monopolies it is deeply flawed. If they had to face up to competition they would have to get their act together. So it is good to hear on the grapevine that this is a project that Google is planning. In the interests of human knowledge let’s hope so.
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Wikipedia is 2007. Didn’t you get the memo?
http://www.squidoo.com/ is what you are looking for gramps.
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There’s a Wiki on every subject, usually two or three–and especially on as popular (and nerdy) a topic as gaming. You can argue Wikipedia has a mindshare monopoly, but not a real one.
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Just because Wikipedia denied your modifications does not automatically render it useless. Obviously there are plenty of cracks within Wikipedia but for what it is there is no doubt that it is a useful tool. Provided that you don’t rely on it for consistently 100% correct information. The website has only been around for a few years so you can’t expect it to completely cover everything to an extent to please everyone.
This article appears as an angry, unsubstantiated backlash. Which is unfortunate.
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Did the editors give a reason for deleting your contributions?
The company I work for wants to have a Wikipedia entry. Somehow, I suspect that writing one and posting it from within the company would be frowned upon. But writing one on company time and then posting it from a different IP address feels unethical to me. Tricky one…
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I have found this great article which explains what is going on and the cult of deletionism amongst Wiki editors that is devaluing the validity of the whole project: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21131
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And another great article that analyses what is broken at Wikipedia: http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/is-something-fundamentally-wrong-with-wikipedia-governance-processes/2008/01/07
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A great article on the deletionist V inclusionist debate: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=199409
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I agree, wikipedia or as I like to call it, wikishitia, is utterly useless. Indeed, it is an outrage and it will prove the end of knowledge. It is run by a cabal of lifeless brain-dead morons who suffer from OCD. Wikishitia manages to distort just about every subject, most especially, anything that has to do with culture or history. They mesh alien cultures together, alien architectural styles and just about everything else. It is essentially a fascist organization run by the brainless and useful only to persons whose wish it is to spread delusional propaganda.
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Wikipedia isn’t useless because it denied your edits. It’s useless because it presents its editors’ opinions as fact.
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I’m guessing that wikipedia deleted your articles because they were written subjectively, not objectively. By the way, I suggest that you mention that the above fields are mandatory, so that I don’t have to type all this again after returning from a page displaying an error message to find all these fields blank. I would have thought this was obvious really…