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In 2012 I wrote my first Wikipedia article on the 50-person startup I was working for at the time. I didn't include anything overly self-promoting, just the bas

In 2012 I wrote my first Wikipedia article on the 50-person startup I was working for at the time. I didn't include anything overly self-promoting, just the basic facts and referenced some news articles. My article was immediately nominated for deletion and a number of community members accused me of being a "single purpose account", i.e. not interested in contributing, just advertising. Needless to say I did not go on to create/edit more articles after a welcome like that. A couple of editors did come to my defence. I got the impression there was a lot of internal conflict about this sort of thing. Edit to add the following: The article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecobee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecobee Deletion discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Ecobee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

koube 10y ago
I think they have a point in that case. You didn't have any interest in contributing until you had a startup you needed to promote. Also, unless your startup is notable it's not supposed to have an article. "If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list... If a topic does not meet these criteria but still has some verifiable facts, it might be useful to discuss it within another article." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#Whether_to_create_standalone_pages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#Whether_t...
- smcmurtry 10y ago
  I actually had been contributing small edits for grammar anonymously for a while, and was interested in getting more involved in Wikipedia. My intention wasn't to promote my employer, I just thought it met the notability requirements.
- delhanty 10y ago
  I agree with the above. However, from my experience in CAD, Wikipedia's notability and importance ratings are strongly skewed towards open-source and against commercial systems. High-importance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:FreeCAD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:FreeCAD Low-importance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:SolidWorks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:SolidWorks No disrespect meant to the FreeCAD folks, but that is definitely back-to-front! The article on Solidworks lists 165,000 companies using the product as of 2013. How is that low-importance? The skew tends to be even worse against enterprise class systems.
  - razwall 10y ago
    Those importance ratings are utterly unimportant. In the vast majority of cases, they are just the opinion of a single editor who looked at the article for 10 seconds, and they only affect how the article is listed in some automated report that nobody ever looks at.
- fenomas 10y ago
  > You didn't have any interest in contributing until you had a startup you needed to promote. That's one explanation of the facts but it's not the only one. Any new user is likely to start out by contributing on topics close to them - places they've worked, technologies they've worked with, etc. If employees aren't allowed to make articles on their employers then that's that. But treating a new account differently than an old one is just assuming bad faith.
- crdb 10y ago
  Additionally, "referenced some news articles" is not sufficient for notability because most startup coverage is PR [1]. Unfortunately, when you get genuine independent journalism, it is also not positive coverage (e.g. Theranos, Magic Leap). [1] http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
tptacek 10y ago
Can you point us to the actual article you wrote? What was its title?
belorn 10y ago
How many 50-person companies do you think have existed, globally, since 2001? Lets just make some very rough estimates. Sweden with a population of 10 million creates an average of 36 500 new companies per year. Let say than 5% reach at some point 50 employees, which would result in 180 Wikipedia articles per million population per year. There is 7.4 billion people in the world, so that is 180 * 1000 * 7.4 * 16, which would be a bit over 21 million Wikipedia articles that only covers new 50-person and bigger companies (not including companies created before 2001). The people who accused you of "single purpose account" were of course in the fault since they should have assumed good-faith, but I can't generally disagree with the notion that a 50-person startup might need more than employees to be notable enough for a encyclopedia.
- sien 10y ago
  The assumption that the world creates 50 person companies at the same rate as Sweden is not likely. Company listings are actually often really useful on wikipedia, there can be some outside info that is far better than what the company itself has and if there are suspect things about the company wikipedia can link to them as well. Wikipedia at one point deleted the article on Atlasssian because 'it wasn't notable'. Unlike so many minor characters in Star Wars...
  - belorn 10y ago
    I said "very rough estimates" since indeed the world average is unlikely to be exactly the same as Sweden. But even if we reduce the global rate to 10% of Sweden (fair?), it is still 2 million articles and would cover half the current size of english Wikipedia. Usefulness of non-notible articles is often discussed in Wikipedia. One side generally argue that any article that is useful should be included. The idea that notability is the criteria and not usefulness is an interesting discussion, and part of the deletionism versus inclusionism controversy.
    - oh_sigh 10y ago
      Considering approximately 2 billion people in the world are self sustaining farmers, even 10% of Swedens rate is an over-estimate.
devwastaken 10y ago
The community of wikimedia and wikipedia is pretty bad with this. I've seen articles locked, then marked for deletion, so you can't add more information to make it 'article-worthy'. They then say that its not 'against the guidelines', as the ultimate excuse. Mediawiki is supposed to also be a communicative platform on these problems, but it really fails its goal there with its talk pages, when these problems really stem from a lack of centralized community and being able to easily talk about and resolve these issues. Typically, you'l get referenced to IRC or another talk page, where your issue will not be resolved and will probably take forever to be responded to. Overall, I've ditched working with Mediawiki or anything wikimedia. They don't show caring to actually invest in open platforms and software that others can use, they're just interested in making their own projects popular. Some of the core devs are actually really good at what they do, the problem is that the framework now needs a big revamp for it to be usable outside of the wikipedia environment properly, something wikimedia will not invest in. If they want to show good faith in freedom of information, they would make their software into components and allow other projects to use them, especially the actual wiki markup processor. This would allow people to integrate wiki functionality into fundamentally better frameworks to maintain, like Drupal 8, or design their own frameworks that internally use the packages maintained in mediawiki.
- tptacek 10y ago
  You say they're "bad" at this, but another word you could use is "consistent", and you could follow that up by suggesting that there's a coherent criteria used for what's deleted, but that nerds have a really hard time understanding it. To wit: Wikipedia not at all concerned about storage space, but they are concerned very much about the amount of time they'll need to spend policing articles to make sure that things that wind up preferentially at the top of Google search result pages aren't full of advertising spam, lies, and cruft. Every article they add increases that burden. A reasonable line to draw in the sand is "we're only going to allow articles that make a clear statement of why their topic is notable, and for which an ordinary, disinterested editor could verify all the facts by following cited sources."
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
yuhong 10y ago
Tip: It would help to disclose in the user page too.

koube 10y ago

I think they have a point in that case. You didn't have any interest in contributing until you had a startup you needed to promote. Also, unless your startup is notable it's not supposed to have an article. "If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list... If a topic does not meet these criteria but still has some verifiable facts, it might be useful to discuss it within another article." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#Whether_to_create_standalone_pages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#Whether_t...

smcmurtry 10y ago
I actually had been contributing small edits for grammar anonymously for a while, and was interested in getting more involved in Wikipedia. My intention wasn't to promote my employer, I just thought it met the notability requirements.
delhanty 10y ago
I agree with the above. However, from my experience in CAD, Wikipedia's notability and importance ratings are strongly skewed towards open-source and against commercial systems. High-importance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:FreeCAD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:FreeCAD Low-importance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:SolidWorks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:SolidWorks No disrespect meant to the FreeCAD folks, but that is definitely back-to-front! The article on Solidworks lists 165,000 companies using the product as of 2013. How is that low-importance? The skew tends to be even worse against enterprise class systems.
- razwall 10y ago
  Those importance ratings are utterly unimportant. In the vast majority of cases, they are just the opinion of a single editor who looked at the article for 10 seconds, and they only affect how the article is listed in some automated report that nobody ever looks at.
fenomas 10y ago
> You didn't have any interest in contributing until you had a startup you needed to promote. That's one explanation of the facts but it's not the only one. Any new user is likely to start out by contributing on topics close to them - places they've worked, technologies they've worked with, etc. If employees aren't allowed to make articles on their employers then that's that. But treating a new account differently than an old one is just assuming bad faith.
crdb 10y ago
Additionally, "referenced some news articles" is not sufficient for notability because most startup coverage is PR [1]. Unfortunately, when you get genuine independent journalism, it is also not positive coverage (e.g. Theranos, Magic Leap). [1] http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

tptacek 10y ago

Can you point us to the actual article you wrote? What was its title?

belorn 10y ago

How many 50-person companies do you think have existed, globally, since 2001? Lets just make some very rough estimates. Sweden with a population of 10 million creates an average of 36 500 new companies per year. Let say than 5% reach at some point 50 employees, which would result in 180 Wikipedia articles per million population per year. There is 7.4 billion people in the world, so that is 180 * 1000 * 7.4 * 16, which would be a bit over 21 million Wikipedia articles that only covers new 50-person and bigger companies (not including companies created before 2001). The people who accused you of "single purpose account" were of course in the fault since they should have assumed good-faith, but I can't generally disagree with the notion that a 50-person startup might need more than employees to be notable enough for a encyclopedia.

sien 10y ago
The assumption that the world creates 50 person companies at the same rate as Sweden is not likely. Company listings are actually often really useful on wikipedia, there can be some outside info that is far better than what the company itself has and if there are suspect things about the company wikipedia can link to them as well. Wikipedia at one point deleted the article on Atlasssian because 'it wasn't notable'. Unlike so many minor characters in Star Wars...
- belorn 10y ago
  I said "very rough estimates" since indeed the world average is unlikely to be exactly the same as Sweden. But even if we reduce the global rate to 10% of Sweden (fair?), it is still 2 million articles and would cover half the current size of english Wikipedia. Usefulness of non-notible articles is often discussed in Wikipedia. One side generally argue that any article that is useful should be included. The idea that notability is the criteria and not usefulness is an interesting discussion, and part of the deletionism versus inclusionism controversy.
  - oh_sigh 10y ago
    Considering approximately 2 billion people in the world are self sustaining farmers, even 10% of Swedens rate is an over-estimate.

devwastaken 10y ago

The community of wikimedia and wikipedia is pretty bad with this. I've seen articles locked, then marked for deletion, so you can't add more information to make it 'article-worthy'. They then say that its not 'against the guidelines', as the ultimate excuse. Mediawiki is supposed to also be a communicative platform on these problems, but it really fails its goal there with its talk pages, when these problems really stem from a lack of centralized community and being able to easily talk about and resolve these issues. Typically, you'l get referenced to IRC or another talk page, where your issue will not be resolved and will probably take forever to be responded to. Overall, I've ditched working with Mediawiki or anything wikimedia. They don't show caring to actually invest in open platforms and software that others can use, they're just interested in making their own projects popular. Some of the core devs are actually really good at what they do, the problem is that the framework now needs a big revamp for it to be usable outside of the wikipedia environment properly, something wikimedia will not invest in. If they want to show good faith in freedom of information, they would make their software into components and allow other projects to use them, especially the actual wiki markup processor. This would allow people to integrate wiki functionality into fundamentally better frameworks to maintain, like Drupal 8, or design their own frameworks that internally use the packages maintained in mediawiki.

tptacek 10y ago
You say they're "bad" at this, but another word you could use is "consistent", and you could follow that up by suggesting that there's a coherent criteria used for what's deleted, but that nerds have a really hard time understanding it. To wit: Wikipedia not at all concerned about storage space, but they are concerned very much about the amount of time they'll need to spend policing articles to make sure that things that wind up preferentially at the top of Google search result pages aren't full of advertising spam, lies, and cruft. Every article they add increases that burden. A reasonable line to draw in the sand is "we're only going to allow articles that make a clear statement of why their topic is notable, and for which an ordinary, disinterested editor could verify all the facts by following cited sources."
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

yuhong 10y ago

Tip: It would help to disclose in the user page too.