My Latest Wikipedia Contribution Got a Less Than Optimal Welcoming Committee
After having studied publications and information on Radar Networks for a recent blog post, I decided I might as well write a Wikipedia article on them while I’m at it. Less than an hour (one hour!) after my initial publication of the article somebody had come along and tagged it, suggesting that it was written as an “advertisement”. Is it just my inexperience with Wikipedia, or does it seem a bit strange for someone to instantly slap a tag on it … even while I’m still doing modifications?
I’m not necessarily suggesting that there’s foul play at hand. I’m sure that veteran Wikipedians have to battle hordes of blood thirsty attention seekers and spammers everyday, and are hence cautious when it comes to company profiles and articles on upcoming products. Nonetheless, the gist of my article is simply an explanation of the semantic web, and the information I posted on the company is mainly a recital of facts and quotes from news articles.
But even though I find the tag a bit bizarre, I haven’t been so blunt as to delete it. I left a message on the person’s discussion page asking for some clarification and suggestions, but as of yet he hasn’t responded. I’ve also posted the following note on the talk page of the article and hope that someone will either make revisions or debunk the tag.
This page was marked as being written as an Advertisement (I fail to detect why and await feedback from the tagger). I hope it’ll raise interest in improving this article in general. I kindly request that those who agree with the tag please either fix the article or suggest revisions, and those who don’t speak their mind. —hthth
Please take a look at the article and let me know what you think. Obviously, if the article actually does somehow appear to be subjective, I’d certainly like to fix that to accomadate a neutral view. And to learn from it. I simply fail to see what that Wikipedian claims at this point.
Update: Well, some progress has been made. After the user refused to make any further comments or suggestions, I requested help and advice on the general Wikipedia Editor Help page. The result was a comment from an editor that made some very good suggestions for improvement, one of which was removing the tag as he considered it unwarranted. I’ve since then made some revisions, according the editor’s comments and other’s I’ve asked for help.
I noticed a few minutes ago that an unregistered user had removed the tag; probably someone who read this article, or one of my requests for advice. Hopefully the person who tagged the article will consider my revisions sufficient and that’ll be the end of it. My thanks to everyone who shared their opinion. Somewhat frustrating to have someone claim your writings are biased when you made (and still want to make) an effort to keep it neutral. Especially when the same individual doesn’t want to tell you why he thinks it is, and when everyone else you ask think it looks fine.
3 Comments, Comment or Ping
Saul Wall
Collectively, the people on Wikipedia (in addition to exhibiting many other unpleasant qualities) are so hyper sensitive about anything that might be an advertisement that you can find virtually nothing on any service, company or product that is new. They seem to have no trouble having huge amounts of information about Coca-Cola but if you want to find out what a new company does or what the purpose of a new social networking program is you will likely be met with an explanation that the page has been completely deleted to prevent it from serving as an advertisement. I once mentioned that maybe a single sentence explaining what something was would be better than telling the public to F-off (I used more polite terms) and I was told that I did not want to get on the side of the people who were trying to post the article since they were jerks and blah blah blah. This was only one of many incidences that have convinced me that Wikipedia is beyond redemption.
Aug 20th, 2007
Hrafn
Thanks for the info Saul. Sad to hear, though. Someone else left a similar comment on the Radar Networks disccusion page.
Like I said above, I can understand why there’s paranoya amongst Wikipedians. But if it’s preventing good and valid information from building up, we need to re-evaluate our methods.
In any case, my revisions seem to have done the trick. Or my reasoning for keeping the article been accepted. Haven’t been any more complaints or requests for revisions.
Aug 20th, 2007
Dante
I’ve made three edits to Wikipedia, all concerning some aspects of AI and philosophy (you can never really seperate them yet, I find)
Here’s the irony, all of them were removed by bots of all things!
Oct 1st, 2008
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