December 22, 2009 at 23:03How we fought for our Wikipedia article on Wikipedia
Dear Habralum,
Recently, a lot of discussion has been going on about deleting articles on various computer programs in the English-language part of Wikipedia and about evaluating the significance criterion .
We present to your attention a story about our experience in working with the Free Encyclopedia when posting our article about the Wapalta program in the Russian part of the Encyclopedia and about the struggle for this article, which at one time was ruthlessly deleted.
In our company, we always try to use various modern media channels to promote and develop our business. Blogs, groups, discussions on the forum of our own mobile social network allow us to communicate with the target audience and quickly receive feedback in the development process of our mobile projects, united by the brand “Network in your pocket”.
But do not immediately keep up with everything. Until the spring of 2009, Wikipedia remained unattended by our attention. Finally, the hands reached.
To see an article about your project in the largest world encyclopedia is, of course, very cool, but I did not want to engage in crooked spam or post frankly advertising materials. Here we need an academic approach. :)
For those who do not know how to write and post an article on Widipedia, welcome to the first, educational program of this post. A more advanced habrayuzer can immediately rewind to the second part, where I wrote about the survival of our article after its removal.
So, the task was to write an article for Wikipedia about the Wapalta / network in your pocket mobile phone program. I undertook the implementation - a candidate of technical sciences, having quite a lot of experience in writing scientific articles, a certified specialist linguist, but new to Wikipedia.
It was supposed to write an article in a few hours, having copied the texts from our site for this task. In fact, everything turned out to be longer and more complicated.
In order to upload images, and in our case these were screenshots of the program and logo, you need to go through registration and wait 4 days after that. During this time, any beginner should have time to get acquainted with the basic rules and tools of Wikipedia.
I honestly trained in the Sandbox - on a special page for experiments. By the way, now there is another section for beginners, Incubator .
An article on Wikipedia should not be advertising, the style had to be encyclopedic. In addition, the information must be presented in a certain order, for which it is useful to penetrate the articles of its significant direct competitors, in our case it was reasonable to carefully study articles about Microsoft and Opera Mini projects.
Then a very important part is working with notes. Each statement should be supported by references to authoritative sources. Hard work: articles about Wapalta were found on different sites, links to which were inserted into the text with the correct tags. For a candidate of philological sciences, this is quite a worthy occupation.)
Since the article was written for several days with breaks, we put on top the template: “Unfinished article”, which informed the guests of the page that you can wait a little more with criticism and corrections.
Finally, the final touches are the categorization of the article, the placement of hyperlinks in the text and the creation of links from thematically related encyclopedia articles to the newly created one.
The article was written in April and quietly existed in the encyclopedia for six months, during which time I made small additions twice, and each time I gave a footnote to an authoritative publication (AI) to confirm new information.
Some time after each revision, Patrolmen - members of the Encyclopedia went to the Wapalta page, looked through, approved the changes, adding cross-references to the text.
We did not use the article about Wapalta in any way, the link was only in our VKontakte group. However, the article brought benefits, as search engines define wiki pages as very relevant.
But the most interesting awaited us ahead ...
In October, we finally decided to place a link to an article about Wapalta on our official website, and ... we saw the inscription: "article deleted!"
Miracles with our article: The user "Zimin" decided to delete the article despite the fact that in the discussion all the speakers said that there were no legal grounds for this. The decision to remove was clearly contrary to the views expressed, but he still just took the article and deleted it. Moreover, the very discussion of this issue, demonstrating the inappropriateness of his actions, he deleted as well.
And here it became clear and understandable to us that wiki society is a separate topic, many irreconcilable members of this community see enemies everywhere, they have their own special lives, their own special conflicts and continuous battle.
Then another independent patrol officer noticed the committed incorrect actions with our article, and began to deal with him, but comrade Zimin simply did not answer him. The question arose about the possibility of the beginning of the Administrators War on this issue in the Contesting Results section .
Just at this time, we noticed the disappearance of the article and began to restore it by submitting an appropriate application .
In our case, claims were brought forward by the Conflict of Interest , which could not be the reason for the removal of a competently written substantial and meaningful article.
The article on Wapalta, of course, was restored.
Plus for us: a heading appeared on the article , that the article has already been approved, and it cannot be deleted.
It's funny: sometimes the discussion about restoration becomes simply endless, for example, among our cultural neighbors on the To Recovery page.
Here is such a story. I hope that this post not only helped you pass the 4 minutes, but also turned out to be useful.
Recently, a lot of discussion has been going on about deleting articles on various computer programs in the English-language part of Wikipedia and about evaluating the significance criterion .
We present to your attention a story about our experience in working with the Free Encyclopedia when posting our article about the Wapalta program in the Russian part of the Encyclopedia and about the struggle for this article, which at one time was ruthlessly deleted.
In our company, we always try to use various modern media channels to promote and develop our business. Blogs, groups, discussions on the forum of our own mobile social network allow us to communicate with the target audience and quickly receive feedback in the development process of our mobile projects, united by the brand “Network in your pocket”.
But do not immediately keep up with everything. Until the spring of 2009, Wikipedia remained unattended by our attention. Finally, the hands reached.
To see an article about your project in the largest world encyclopedia is, of course, very cool, but I did not want to engage in crooked spam or post frankly advertising materials. Here we need an academic approach. :)
For those who do not know how to write and post an article on Widipedia, welcome to the first, educational program of this post. A more advanced habrayuzer can immediately rewind to the second part, where I wrote about the survival of our article after its removal.
1. How to write an article about a company so that it is left on Wikipedia?
So, the task was to write an article for Wikipedia about the Wapalta / network in your pocket mobile phone program. I undertook the implementation - a candidate of technical sciences, having quite a lot of experience in writing scientific articles, a certified specialist linguist, but new to Wikipedia.
It was supposed to write an article in a few hours, having copied the texts from our site for this task. In fact, everything turned out to be longer and more complicated.
In order to upload images, and in our case these were screenshots of the program and logo, you need to go through registration and wait 4 days after that. During this time, any beginner should have time to get acquainted with the basic rules and tools of Wikipedia.
Encyclopedia Information
- Any significant edits to articles are displayed in the encyclopedia in the History tab. Each (even unregistered) visitor to the encyclopedia can make changes to almost any article (only registered users are allowed to edit the most popular and controversial).
- Each participant in the Encyclopedia has a personal page where you can introduce yourself, indicate your area of interest and conduct dialogs with other authors. From our company stands Elenaro .
- When using the Free Encyclopedia, it is necessary to observe the basic rule - to assume good intentions , as well as follow all other strict rules
- So, one of the criteria for adding articles to a wiki is the significance of the article being added (that is, what the article says should be meaningful for people, informative, be objective and should not carry explicit advertising messages).
I honestly trained in the Sandbox - on a special page for experiments. By the way, now there is another section for beginners, Incubator .
An article on Wikipedia should not be advertising, the style had to be encyclopedic. In addition, the information must be presented in a certain order, for which it is useful to penetrate the articles of its significant direct competitors, in our case it was reasonable to carefully study articles about Microsoft and Opera Mini projects.
Then a very important part is working with notes. Each statement should be supported by references to authoritative sources. Hard work: articles about Wapalta were found on different sites, links to which were inserted into the text with the correct tags. For a candidate of philological sciences, this is quite a worthy occupation.)
Since the article was written for several days with breaks, we put on top the template: “Unfinished article”, which informed the guests of the page that you can wait a little more with criticism and corrections.
Finally, the final touches are the categorization of the article, the placement of hyperlinks in the text and the creation of links from thematically related encyclopedia articles to the newly created one.
The article was written in April and quietly existed in the encyclopedia for six months, during which time I made small additions twice, and each time I gave a footnote to an authoritative publication (AI) to confirm new information.
Some time after each revision, Patrolmen - members of the Encyclopedia went to the Wapalta page, looked through, approved the changes, adding cross-references to the text.
Additional information about working with the encyclopedia
- All edits can be discussed and challenged both on the pages for discussing the articles themselves and on the pages of project participants.
- Despite the fact that the definition of the encyclopedia says that Wikipedia is not a social network, actions such as live communication, dating and ranking by the status of active participants are an important part of the successful development of the encyclopedia.
- There are really a lot of rules, regulatory procedures, amendments to them and legislative essays. When resolving contentious issues, experienced participants operate on them like real-life hook-makers at a court session.
We did not use the article about Wapalta in any way, the link was only in our VKontakte group. However, the article brought benefits, as search engines define wiki pages as very relevant.
But the most interesting awaited us ahead ...
2. How to fight for your article to be left?
In October, we finally decided to place a link to an article about Wapalta on our official website, and ... we saw the inscription: "article deleted!"
How to delete articles?
- Big minus: no notifications about this do not come.
- A big surprise: any user has the right to submit an article for deletion, writes about it on a special page, discussion / voting lasts only a week, after which a decision is made.
Miracles with our article: The user "Zimin" decided to delete the article despite the fact that in the discussion all the speakers said that there were no legal grounds for this. The decision to remove was clearly contrary to the views expressed, but he still just took the article and deleted it. Moreover, the very discussion of this issue, demonstrating the inappropriateness of his actions, he deleted as well.
And here it became clear and understandable to us that wiki society is a separate topic, many irreconcilable members of this community see enemies everywhere, they have their own special lives, their own special conflicts and continuous battle.
Then another independent patrol officer noticed the committed incorrect actions with our article, and began to deal with him, but comrade Zimin simply did not answer him. The question arose about the possibility of the beginning of the Administrators War on this issue in the Contesting Results section .
Just at this time, we noticed the disappearance of the article and began to restore it by submitting an appropriate application .
How are articles restored?
- This is done in the special section Towards restoration , where the application is submitted and the arguments are given.
- During the week a discussion is held, only reasoned opinions of the parties are accepted. Typically, problems in new articles arise in accordance with the Criterion of Importance: articles devoted to phenomena that do not have much proven encyclopedic significance are resolutely deleted.
- Then a summary is made.
In our case, claims were brought forward by the Conflict of Interest , which could not be the reason for the removal of a competently written substantial and meaningful article.
The article on Wapalta, of course, was restored.
Plus for us: a heading appeared on the article , that the article has already been approved, and it cannot be deleted.
It's funny: sometimes the discussion about restoration becomes simply endless, for example, among our cultural neighbors on the To Recovery page.
Here is such a story. I hope that this post not only helped you pass the 4 minutes, but also turned out to be useful.