[hackerspaces] Wikipedia user suggesting deleting loads of Hackerspaces!

[Matt Goodman]

*   Useful, accurate, and exhaustive are not specific goals of wikipedia*.
 Encyclopedic is the gold standard.  With that said, consider the following,
there is almost no piece of information that will be deleted, if instead its
home (perhaps under a different page) is found.  As a long
term campaigner against deletion, I have noted successful strategies, I
would suggest the following group tactics:


   1. Include every external citation possible.   This helps to an extent,
   but even pages with 2-3 outside verifiable links may still be deemed
   not sufficiently notable.  If everything with three nows sources was
   included . . . I mean, wikipedia would kinda suck.
   2. Group pages.  The Austin Hackerspace does not yet meet notability
   guidelines, but a page on "US Southwest Hackerspaces" almost certainly
   would.
   3. Integrate with the wikipedia infrastructure.  A hackerspace sidebar
   template, and stub-tag would make things more internally reputable.  Most
   pages that fail to meet notability guidelines don't look notable.  Template
   integration boosts the confidence an editor will have in casually viewing a
   page.
   4. I know there was some talk of it earlier in the year, but a
   hackerspace genealogy would be really useful in this whole project.  This
   page could also serve as the jumping off ground for a lot of small spaces.
    As their section on the page grew, eventually it could spin off when it met
   critical size of notability.  This also could include links from
   hackerspaces that describe their founding because it is not specifically
   about them.
   5. We could get a wikipedia project started with this whole goal in mind.
    I did a lot of work on the metal work project back in the day, and getting
   a group of similarly interested editors together is the best way
   to simultaneously provide good content, effective review, and cohesive
   action.  Anyone wanna start up a
wiki-project<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Guide>
proposal?
    If we had even one contributer from each hackerspace, we could get that
   started and roll a vote _no problem_.

--Matthew Goodman

=====================
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On Sun, Feb 20, 2011 at 9:24 AM, Yves Quemener <quemener.yves at free.fr>wrote:

> On 02/20/2011 12:51 AM, Rory McCann wrote:
> > The wikipedia editor suggesting it, has made some strange claims, and
> > seems to want to delete all hackerspaces. He seems to think hackerspaces
> > are all in some big conspiracy. I added some sources to other
> > hackerspaces (e.g. when we did the cupcake challenge) and he thought
> > they were unsuitable, since "Artifactory is a hackerspace site, so it's
> > not independent of the subject. Same with 091Labs."
>
> Just to add my 2 cents, last time I read a bit about wikipedia's
> policies, I found a counterintuitive one : when writing about a person
> (and probably about an organization too) it is considered inappropriate
> that the subject edits its own wikipedia page. It may seem strange as
> the subject has probably more information about itself than anyone else,
> but think about it : do you want a politician or a company write about
> itself in wikipedia ? The subject is welcomed to give a lot of
> informations and sources in the talk: pages but it is independent people
> who have to decide which is relevant. That may be the reason why they
> consider a hackerspace member should not write about another hackerspace.
>
> Iv
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>
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