With all the fuss about Wiki this and Wiki that, I decided to give Wikipedia a try to see how people go about creating and editing entries on it. The whole page creation process, though, eft a lot to be desired. For starters, I couldn’t see where you go about creating a new entry. What I had to do in the end was do a search for what I wanted to write about (in this case I chose Harry Hallowes) and only then did it present me with a link to create an entry because it found that none existed yet.
No page with that title exists.
You can create this page or request it.
After clicking on the ‘Create this page’ link, I was told I needed to create an account. The Sign up process was pretty smooth and painless as is usual for websites these days but after signing up, it lost context of where I was and I had to do the whole null search thing so that I could get to the ‘create this page’ link again.
After finally getting to the edit page, I was presented with a great big blank box. What the? I’m so used to seeing nicely laid out sections and headings in wikipedia entries that I just assumed there must have been a standard template for users to type into. Having a completely blank box threw me off a bit. How do I make headings, add links, horizontal lines, and what not? Well, since I was just testing this out, I just typed in a few lines without bothering about formatting, just to see my first page show up. I figured I can always edit it later. I shouldn’t have bothered.
- Link to my Wikipedia Entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_hallowes
Within 15 minutes, this user going by the name ‘Princess Tiswas’ had replaced my external link to brilliances.com with the proper bbc source. sigh
5 days later, Alaibot the robot tagged my entry as being ‘uncategorised’. Sure enough Princess Tiswas came back not long after and added homelessness and squats for categories.
Now that I’ve made my first entry, I can safely say that that was also my last entry. It was good just to say I’ve been there, done that and I have absolutely no idea why people waste their free time making contributions to wikipedia. I can only imagine that in its infancy, it was a good way to get links onto your own site so a lot of webmasters would contribute and put their own links on as sources of info (just as I tried to do :p). But now that all the external links have the dreaded ‘no-follow’ attribute (which means search engines won’t look at these links at all!), it’s pretty much pointless for me to ever add my 2 cents on wikipedia again - I have much better things to spend my precious time on!
Jimmy Wales: Founder of Wikipedia (and now Wikiquote, WikiBooks, Wikia, Wiktionary, WIkiNews, WikiInYourFace, WikiEverywhere, …)
Source: Wikipedia
Jimmy’s next commercial venture is a WikiSearch that he’s hoping with give Google a run for its money. A community edited search listing - I’d like to see how that’s going to work. There’s zillions of dollars at stake in the search industry. Tell me the SERPs are not going to be highjacked by just about every company on the net. The idea seems good but it will be interesting to see how he plans to tackle some of these key, show-stopping, issues. And if it does get of the ground, RiverGold Associates who squats on the WikiSearch.COM domain and Angela Beesley who blogs on her WikiSearch.ORG domain both stand to make a LOT of money.
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4 comments ↓
I’m pretty sure your entry wont satisfy the wikipedian policy of notability. That means it will probably be deleted in the near future for not being notable enough.
That was a good post. Enjoyed it. Princess Tiswas sounds like a person that would be a bit annoying in real life. :P Than again, they do need to keep their eyes on things there or the site would lose all credibility. They already have many issues with inaccuracy.
BTW, did Wikipedia at least send you a thank you email for contributing an article?
Nup. No thank you what-so-ever. :(
That sucks. It’s too bad that entities that are “made” by the users don’t ever seem to show much thanks or appreciation for it.
If it weren’t for people submitting articles Wikipedia wouldn’t even exist in the first place! It’s not that hard to set up automated “Thank you for contributing!” emails, for crying out loud. What a shame.
Shine on,
Aaron
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