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[pozorvlak]

I wrote my third Wikipedia article today, on the mountaineer Mick Fowler. Does anyone have any comments? I'm particularly looking at elvum here, but any and all thoughts would be good. I'm conscious of the fact that, though fairly long, it's not very detailed - since my copy of Vertical Pleasure is currently out on loan, I cribbed most of the information from his profile on his sponsors' website. Hence, it's mostly a long list of rock climbs, without any Human Interest (of which there is plenty - follow the link to the story of his climb on Changabang, for instance).

I'll be interested to see how it evolves. My first article, on Jean Couzy (another mountaineer) has only had one factual update (plus a few minor formatting changes), and my second, another bio-stub for Simon "Coding for God" Cozens, has turned into a low-grade fire-fighting exercise, with plenty of idiots well-meaning but misinformed people constantly removing even the basic information I put on the page to start with. One particularly gifted individual even removed the "Christianity bio-stub" tag, commenting that "The guy's a Perl evangelist, not a Christ evangelist". Er, actually, he's both, as even the most cursory research would have taught you.

So, how many Wikipedia articles have you lot written? Zero? A couple? A few dozen? Hundreds? And how many pages have you contributed to? Do you go around fixing typos and grammatical mistakes when you see them? Have you made substantial contributions to any pages? And were they in your nominal field of expertise, or outside?

Comments

[susannahf.livejournal.com]

I improved one, then considered adding other ones, and got scared off by people who basically said "yeah this one on instance n is good, but don't write any on the other instances because they're not worthy of an entry". As I would have inevitably done a fair amount of research to write them, I wasn't prepared to go to all that effort and then have them deleted. So I sort of gave up.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the speedy deletion mafia piss me off. My other recent Wikipedia experience was an argument over whether changing your name to Optimus Prime (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Optimus_Prime_%28person%29_%284th_nomination%29) makes you notable enough to be included in Wikipedia - I think that it should, and that the articles on minor yet fascinating things are one of the truly great things about Wikipedia. Unfortunately, the rule-obsessed admins with eighty-column minds (http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/E/eighty-column-mind.html) disagree. Seriously - Wikipedia is effectively unlimited in size, why does it need notability guidelines at all?

[totherme.livejournal.com]

There was some chat in #xmonad about the wikipedia notability guidelines when someone tried to take down the xmonad entry. I vaguely remember there being some sane motivation for the various rules - stuff like not wanting people using it to run a business from and so on. I don't actually remember much of that now...

I dunno - do you want to stop people writing articles about themselves and their own insignificant pet projects?

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

No, not really. If people don't want to know about it, they won't read it, and I really don't see search being that big a problem. I don't want people running businesses out of Wikipedia, sure, but that's a Point of View issue rather than a notability one.

[mi-guida.livejournal.com]

Well, isn't this where the furore over the plan to delete the OULES Wiki page comes in?

OULES no longer has a Wiki page, unlike CULES, because we haven't had any famous members so it's not interesting for anyone to know about us except as a mention on the CULES page.

Um, otherwise I avoid Wikipedia, in the belief that whatever I know, either someone else knows, or I'm wrong and I don't want to get told off (I'm a coward, even online).

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

There was a long struggle to keep the CULES page too.

[mi-guida.livejournal.com]

Ah, ok. I misssed that one.

I wasn't particularly criticising whether there was one there or not - to be honest, I rarely look at Wiki at all and don't quite get it - just sort of noting, given peoples' own personal projects were mentioned.

Anyway, will hush now and crawl back into the pile of junk that appears to be all my most important possessions :s

[totherme.livejournal.com]

I wonder if there's a market for a background noise wiki, with no notability rules (and perhaps more relaxed rules generally)?

The search function of the new wiki could pass through to wikipedia as well as searching locallly - and possibly weight up the "official" wikipedia results like slashdot comments. Wikiwords from the new wiki could link to topics in wikipedia (but obviously not the other way around, since that would require wikipedia cooperation and would kind of be against the spirit of the thing anyway). If a topic on the new wiki turned into something that met the higher wikipedia standards, then tools could be provided to help migrate it across...

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

There's Anarchopedia (http://eng.anarchopedia.org/Main_Page), but it doesn't have the "forward to Wikipedia" features you describe (which you'd need to have any hope of getting user acceptance).

[michiexile]

I basically rewrote a pathetic excuse for an article on Ext to what it is today. I have made minor but substantial contributions to things like Operad theory and one or two more mathematical corners. And I have contributed with random fact-checking and fact-correcting on West Wing-associated things.

It's scary how much I know by now about West Wing. I have watched each episode at least five times by now, and can remember large parts of an episode and almost place them within season and season-third...

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, I see your name is pretty prominent in the Ext article's history :-) I'd like some day to substantially re-write the ghastly article on adjoint functors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjunction), which includes such nonsense as "This overt use of impredicativity is honest, in a way that category theory has no intention of being."

Weirdly, I've contributed considerably more to Wikipedia's coverage of mountaineering than to its coverage of mathematics...

[michiexile]

Yeah, that was interesting ramble to read. Please go and clean it up some day.

[wholepint.livejournal.com]

None, though a young man did 'vandalise' (in Wikipedia's terms) an entry on my behalf a couple of days ago...