How we fought for our article on Wapalta on Wikipedia
Dear Habralyudi,
Recently, a lot of discussion has been going on about deleting articles on various computer programs in the English part of Wikipedia and about evaluating the criterion of significance .
We present to you a story about our experience of interacting with the Free Encyclopedia when placing 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 subjected to ruthless removal.
In our company we always try to use various modern media channels for business promotion and development. 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 of our mobile projects united by the Network in Your Pocket brand.
But you can't keep up with everything at once. Up until the spring of 2009, Wikipedia remained uncovered. Finally, hands reached.
')
Seeing an article about your project in the biggest world encyclopedia is, of course, very cool, but I didn’t want to engage in curvy spam or post frankly promotional materials. It needs an academic approach. :)
For those who do not know how to write and post an article in Widipedia - welcome to the first, likbezovskuyu part of this post. A more advanced habrayuser can immediately rewind to the second part, where I wrote about the survival of our article after its removal.
So, the challenge was to write an article for Wikipedia about the program for mobile phones "Wapalta / network in your pocket." I took up the implementation - a candidate of technical sciences, who has quite a lot of experience in writing scientific articles, a graduate linguist, but a newcomer to Wikipedia.
It was supposed to write an article in a few hours, copying texts from our site for this task. In fact, everything was longer and more difficult.
In order to upload images, and in our case these were screenshots of the program and the logo, it is necessary to register and wait 4 days after that. During this time, any newcomer should have time to get acquainted with the basic rules and tools of Wikipedia.
I honestly practiced in the Sandbox - on a special page for the experiments. By the way, now there is another section for beginners, Incubator .
The article in Wikipedia should not be advertising, it was necessary to withstand the encyclopedic style. 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 scrutinize the articles about the projects of Microsoft and Opera Mini.
Then a very important part is working with notes. Each statement must be supported by links to reputable sources. Painstaking work: articles about Wapalta were found on different sites, links to which were inserted into the text with the correct tags. For the candidate of philological sciences - quite a worthy occupation.)
Since the article was written for several days with breaks, we put a template on top: “Unfinished article”, which informed the guests of the page that you can wait a little more with criticism and revisions.
Finally, the final touches are the categorization of the article, the placing of hyperlinks in the text and the creation of links from thematically close 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 the authoritative edition (AI) to confirm the new information.
Some time after each edit, Patrol - Encyclopedia participants visited the Wapalta page, viewed, approved the changes made, adding cross-references to the text.
We didn’t use the article about Wapalta, the link was only in our VKontakte group. However, the article was useful, as search engines identify wiki pages as very relevant.
But the most interesting things 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: “the article has been 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 delete clearly contradicted the views expressed, but he still just took the article and deleted it. Moreover, he himself deleted the discussion of this question itself, which demonstrates all the incompetence of his actions.
And here it became clear to us that wiki society is a separate topic, many irreconcilable members of this community see enemies everywhere, they have their own special life, their own special conflicts and continuous battle.
Then another independent patrolman noticed the incorrect actions taken with our article, and began to deal with him, but Comrade Zimin simply did not respond to him . There was a question about the possibility of the start of the War of Administrators on this issue in the Challenging Results section .
Just at that time, we noticed the loss of the article and began to restore it by submitting a corresponding application .
In our case, claims were made on the Conflict of Interest , which could not have been the reason for the deletion of a competently written informative and meaningful article.
The article about Wapalta, of course, restored.
Plus for us: a cap appeared on the article, that the article was already approved, and it cannot be deleted.
Amusing: sometimes the discussion about restoration becomes simply endless, for example, at our cultural neighbors on the page To Restoration.
Here is such a story. I hope that this post not only helped pass you 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 part of Wikipedia and about evaluating the criterion of significance .
We present to you a story about our experience of interacting with the Free Encyclopedia when placing 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 subjected to ruthless removal.
In our company we always try to use various modern media channels for business promotion and development. 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 of our mobile projects united by the Network in Your Pocket brand.
But you can't keep up with everything at once. Up until the spring of 2009, Wikipedia remained uncovered. Finally, hands reached.
')
Seeing an article about your project in the biggest world encyclopedia is, of course, very cool, but I didn’t want to engage in curvy spam or post frankly promotional materials. It needs an academic approach. :)
For those who do not know how to write and post an article in Widipedia - welcome to the first, likbezovskuyu part of this post. A more advanced habrayuser 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 in Wikipedia?
So, the challenge was to write an article for Wikipedia about the program for mobile phones "Wapalta / network in your pocket." I took up the implementation - a candidate of technical sciences, who has quite a lot of experience in writing scientific articles, a graduate linguist, but a newcomer to Wikipedia.
It was supposed to write an article in a few hours, copying texts from our site for this task. In fact, everything was longer and more difficult.
In order to upload images, and in our case these were screenshots of the program and the logo, it is necessary to register and wait 4 days after that. During this time, any newcomer should have time to get acquainted with the basic rules and tools of Wikipedia.
Information about working with the encyclopedia
- Any significant edits to articles are displayed in the encyclopedia on the History tab. Each (even unregistered) encyclopedia visitor can make changes to almost any article (only registered users are allowed to edit the most popular and controversial).
- Each member of the Encyclopedia has a personal page where you can introduce yourself, indicate the scope of your interests and conduct dialogues with other authors of articles. From our company stands Elenaro .
- When using the Free Encyclopedia, you must follow the basic rule - assume good intentions , as well as observe all other strict rules.
- So, one of the criteria for adding articles to the wiki is the significance of the article being added (that is, what the article says about it should be meaningful for people, informative, objective and should not carry explicit advertising messages).
I honestly practiced in the Sandbox - on a special page for the experiments. By the way, now there is another section for beginners, Incubator .
The article in Wikipedia should not be advertising, it was necessary to withstand the encyclopedic style. 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 scrutinize the articles about the projects of Microsoft and Opera Mini.
Then a very important part is working with notes. Each statement must be supported by links to reputable sources. Painstaking work: articles about Wapalta were found on different sites, links to which were inserted into the text with the correct tags. For the candidate of philological sciences - quite a worthy occupation.)
Since the article was written for several days with breaks, we put a template on top: “Unfinished article”, which informed the guests of the page that you can wait a little more with criticism and revisions.
Finally, the final touches are the categorization of the article, the placing of hyperlinks in the text and the creation of links from thematically close 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 the authoritative edition (AI) to confirm the new information.
Some time after each edit, Patrol - Encyclopedia participants visited the Wapalta page, viewed, approved the changes made, adding cross-references to the text.
Learn more 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 the project participants.
- Despite the fact that the definition of the encyclopedia states that Wikipedia is not a social network, such actions as live communication, dating and ranking by the status of active participants is an important part of the successful development of the encyclopedia.
- There are really a lot of rules governing procedures, amendments to them and legislative essays. At the decision of controversial moments experienced participants operate with them as a real barricade at a court session.
We didn’t use the article about Wapalta, the link was only in our VKontakte group. However, the article was useful, as search engines identify wiki pages as very relevant.
But the most interesting things awaited us ahead ...
2. How to fight for your article to leave it?
In October, we finally decided to place a link to an article about Wapalta on our official website, and ... we saw the inscription: “the article has been deleted”!
How to delete articles?
- Big minus: no notification of this does not come.
- Big surprise: any user has the right to make 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 delete clearly contradicted the views expressed, but he still just took the article and deleted it. Moreover, he himself deleted the discussion of this question itself, which demonstrates all the incompetence of his actions.
And here it became clear to us that wiki society is a separate topic, many irreconcilable members of this community see enemies everywhere, they have their own special life, their own special conflicts and continuous battle.
Then another independent patrolman noticed the incorrect actions taken with our article, and began to deal with him, but Comrade Zimin simply did not respond to him . There was a question about the possibility of the start of the War of Administrators on this issue in the Challenging Results section .
Just at that time, we noticed the loss of the article and began to restore it by submitting a corresponding application .
How are articles recovered?
- This is done in a special section on Recovery , where the application is filed and arguments are presented.
- A discussion is held during the week, only reasoned opinions of the parties are accepted. Usually, problems with new articles arise with compliance with the Criterion of Significance: articles devoted to phenomena that do not have much proven encyclopedic significance are decisively deleted.
- Then the result is made.
In our case, claims were made on the Conflict of Interest , which could not have been the reason for the deletion of a competently written informative and meaningful article.
The article about Wapalta, of course, restored.
Plus for us: a cap appeared on the article, that the article was already approved, and it cannot be deleted.
Amusing: sometimes the discussion about restoration becomes simply endless, for example, at our cultural neighbors on the page To Restoration.
Here is such a story. I hope that this post not only helped pass you 4 minutes, but also turned out to be useful.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/79012/
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