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Help with Wikipedia article?

Ole Juul wrote:

Another way to get good Googleicity is to use one of the free blogs. For example, go to Baywords and set up a blog about whatever you want. Just a couple of minutes after posting you will be able to Google it! I'm guessing that sites like that have a lot of traffic and that makes the takeup extremely fast. Nevertheless on my own obscure domain name it works too if its a blog rather than a web page.

Likewise I reckon that would sound like a cool idea to have a little frontend to my website as a Blog which Google will pickup!

While Turbo Pascal 3 is old hat now, there's not much interest in it now & cause I've been trying to coax my audience into using it - limited in that respect because the best programs (well most I guess) are machine specific! Needs more generic games & unfortunately while I maybe able to throw one or two in, I'm flat out again as per usual! 8-o
 
Hi All!

There has been a recent development on the wikipedia article for the N8VEM project. Apparently having independent media do articles on the subject still does not meet the criteria for "wikipedia notability". So the N8VEM article is rejected once again.

I surely wish wikipedia would be a little more consistent. They said I needed independent third parties to review the project in the media and when that occurs, still that is not enough and now I feel like they are "moving the goal posts".

What is it going to take to get an article accepted? I would appreciate it if the wikipedia process were a lot more clear and understandable to the lay person. It certainly does not encourage spending any time bothering to document things in wikipedia. Here is the rejection notice:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Articles_for_creation/Submissions/N8VEM

What is ironic is that the P112 wikipedia article, which should be at least comparable as it is also a home brew computing project, does not seem to have the same standards applied. Not to detract from the P112 project, as it is a wonderful thing and a fine project, but wikipedia surely could benefit from some consistency in article acceptance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P112

Thanks and have a nice day!

Andrew Lynch
 
Wkipedia is anyway likely to change soon, after the incident when some prankster had written that Ted Kennedy had died during the lunch following the President installation. They will probably start having qualified staff validating all edits and additions, so you have real people to speak to instead of a lot of anonymous editors.

Besides, I'm not sure being mentioned in an encyclopedia is the answer to everything. Is the N8VEM project really of encyclopediac dimensions? Search engines will help people find it as long as you are using good search terms, have other pages and high ranked media write and link to it. Google seems to rank Wikipedia high, while e.g. MSN Search completely ignores Wikipedia in their search results. From one day to another one won't know what will happen to those relationships, perhaps all your efforts to get the project into the "people's encyclopedia" will be fruitless.

Sorry, but currently I think you could use your spare web editing time on organising the actual N8VEM web site to look a little more like a project and less like a collection of related links. Perhaps you can filter out the important stuff from previous messages on the mailing list and make into actual articles, editable if required.
 
Sorry, but currently I think you could use your spare web editing time on organising the actual N8VEM web site to look a little more like a project and less like a collection of related links. Perhaps you can filter out the important stuff from previous messages on the mailing list and make into actual articles, editable if required.

Yes, I would have to agree with Anders here. I woud forget wikipedia Andrew and develop a really good project site. Put the right keywords in, link to it from a few other sites and the spiders will soon start indexing it so it will show up on search engines.

Tez
 
Hi All!

After occasional bouts of wikipedia masochism, it finally occurred to me that the wikipedia "powers that be" will never accept my N8VEM homebrew computing page regardless of merit. I think an N8VEM wikipedia page is probably overcome by events at this point but I was able to transfer the work to the VC wiki. I think it makes a lot of sense to have the page here.

http://wiki.vintage-computer.com/index.php/N8VEM

Thanks and have a nice day!

Andrew Lynch

PS, I'd like to thank Erik and the team for having such a great vintage/classic computer website and forum for us on the internet.
 
Hm yes, I read the comments to an article the other day where someone had posted a BASIC program to verify a fact, but was afraid it would categorize as own research if the results of the program were included in the article. Never mind anyone could run the program itself and see its correctness. Apparently there is a clause about expert knowledge that bypasses the own research one, but Andrew and friends probably can't be considered experts on the N8VEM despite they were the ones to design it.
 
I spent tens of hours on the CGA article just to have a lot of my stuff challenged.

I've also been frustrated numerous times by adding information to Wikipedia articles that I read in books, and not simply pulled from the air, only to have it reverted.

Some of these have been incredibly silly, like having people leave edits intact, but change words to the British spelling of them (color to colour, etc.) even though it's purely empirical which is correct.

I agree with Trixter though that the CGA is capable of more than what the average smuck out there knows![/FONT]

Definitely. That's what happens though when you just download games off of abandonware sites, play them for five minutes on newer hardware, and put on your site something like "Yeah, this ancient game has horrible pink and aqua CGA graphics"

As an example, have you noticed that every screenshot of Dig Dug on the net has the cyan-magenta-white palette, even though the game doesn't look like that on real CGA?
 
I used to be involved with Wikipedia quote a lot, but about 18 months ago I stopped editing, and more or less gave up with it entirely.

- People are too protective of articles they write, and even if it reads like a badly-written middle school essay, they will obsessively revert any corrections, no matter how well cited. And the Wikipedia rules are so impenetrable that there's always some loophole they can use to justify it.

- It's increasingly becoming less about facts and sources, and more about useless lists and collections of trivia. For example List of Fictional Badgers.

- Obsessive fans of certain topics write fifty-thousand word articles discussing the finer points of how the Deathstar was constructed, meanwhile real topics are left as stubs, or full of blatant errors for months. Consider that the article about Knuckles the echidna from Sonic the Hedgehog is three times the length of the one about the real echidna

- A while ago they got the idea that Wikipedia would one day be a real, published encyclopaedia, and encouraged people to go through every article with a fine-toothed comb and anything that wasn't properly cited is either removed, or plastered with (citation needed) tags, even if it's a blatantly true statement such as "The sky is blue".

- The mass-removal of 80% of the images. Companies and photographic agencies generally provide cleared images specifically designed for inclusion in things like newspapers or books. Yet because they're not released under whatever copyleft variant Wikipedia is using this week they're removed en-masse and replaced with blurry cellphone pictures.
 
- Obsessive fans of certain topics write fifty-thousand word articles discussing the finer points of how the Deathstar was constructed, meanwhile real topics are left as stubs, or full of blatant errors for months. Consider that the article about Knuckles the echidna from Sonic the Hedgehog is three times the length of the one about the real echidna

Example: There have been a number of American warships named USS Enterprise, but the articles about them are generally nowhere near the size of the ones about the various Star Trek USS Enterprises.
 
On the other hand, traditional encyclopedias would be very careful to bring in articles about Star Trek, and if they did they would keep it short to keep relative relevance to other articles.
 
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