Groking Wikipedia

I love Wikipedia. After Google, and Yahoo!, it's my most searched web service.

I visit Wikipedia at least once a day according to my Root Vault.

So I've been wanting to spend more time understanding Wikipedia. I've edited a few pages over the years but haven't really spent the time to understand the culture and technology of Wikipedia.

So when I visited the Silicon Alley page that was created by Jason Calacanis and saw that my name linked to a Canadian politician and Jerry Colonna's name linked to a comedian, I decided to do something about that.

I started by creating a page about me. My plan was to invite all of you to go there and add anything you think is relevant so it's a true Wikipedia page. But I figured it would be best for me to get the thing going.

But as you'll see if you go visit the page I created, it's being considered for deletion because it's a vanity page. I totally get that. You can't let people create pages about themselves or Wikipedia would be filled with vanity pages.

In fact, in impressive fashion, within seconds of me creating the page, it was flagged for "speedy deletion" by a community monitor. I put a "hang on" tag on the page and started this discussion about wheter or not the page should be allowed to remain.

So we will see how this plays out. I hope they let it stay up and I hope that those of you who are so inclined will go there and add whatever you think is appropriate. I tried to be inclusive and list my failed investments as well as my successful ones, for example. Truth is what I am looking for, not gloss.

If they do take it down, I've saved the work and will send it to anyone who volunteers to put it up under another name. We'll see how that plays out. I'll keep you posted.

Comments (8) | Posted June 10, 2006 in Venture Capital and Technology

Comments

Fred - had a similar experience, but someone had started "my" page ahead of me - was able to edit it without being flagged. It's a fascinating system and you're right, they have to have safeguards or it turns to MySpace pretty fast...

Posted by: Tom W. | Jun 10, 2006 8:27:09 AM

Wikipedia is the largest and most comprehensive collection of arguments in human history. -- Lore Sjöberg.

Posted by: Mike Abundo | Jun 10, 2006 8:52:07 AM

i'll start yours if you'll start mine

Posted by: steve | Jun 10, 2006 9:02:57 AM

Fred,
Me too. I edited the Cybercafe page to show my contribution to the subject (invented it and the word), but had to insert a hanging link, because there is no page about me. I've resisted adding a page mainly because I don't want to give any Wikimeister the opportunity to jump in and flag it for deletion. But I'm not sure it's very useful. It just makes a dead link at the moment.
There is also a hanging entry pointing to my name at the .uk entry ('This allowed many more registrations to be processed far more reliably and rapidly, and inspired individuals such as Ivan Pope to explore more entrepreneurial approaches to registration.')

Posted by: ivan | Jun 10, 2006 10:15:16 AM

Same thing happened to me when I tried to create a page on 'freemium'. I figured they have pages on other business models, so why not the freemium model. But, it got rejected for being a neologism. Go figure.

Posted by: Jarid | Jun 10, 2006 10:55:58 AM

it's interesting. the new ceo of wikia was talking about the restrictiveness of wikipedia.org.

Posted by: Peter | Jun 10, 2006 11:58:26 AM

You might find my recent experience interesting: http://blog.rebang.com/?p=889

The page wasn't about me. Wasn't started by me. However, I'm the originator of the word that someone posted for inclusion. And since then, the originator of the word "spime" (which *is* in the wikipedia) appears to have adopted my term as well.

It's definitely been of interest to me if only from the way the site is being gamed. Especially interesting to read the stories since about people being "targeted" by other members of the "wikipedia community".

Posted by: csven | Jun 10, 2006 1:40:41 PM

"You can't let people create pages about themselves or Wikipedia would be filled with vanity pages."

I'm not so sure that is a bad thing. It might be useful, and interesting.

Posted by: reinkefj | Jun 11, 2006 2:02:28 PM

A VC

Musings of a VC in NYC