Deborah Elizabeth Finn wrote:
On 3/27/06, Andy Carvin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi everyone,
Taran Rampersad recently posted a message to his blog,
www.knowprose.com, about the fact that he's recently been added to
Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taran_Rampersad
Dear Andy,
Very cool! And I love that photo of Taran.
How does one get to be immortalized with a Wikipedia entry? There was
one of me for a day or two, but then it was fastracked for deletion.
:-( Otherwise, I would have wanted to be in the "digital divide
activists" category.
That's a really good question. I noticed on Taran's talk page
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taran_Rampersad) that there had been
a debate as to whether his entry should remain on the site, and it
hinged on whether Taran had been quoted or discussed by mainstream
media. Since he'd be interviewed by the BBC and had taken a leadership
role in several important online projects, the proposal to delete him
got retracted.
As for why yours got cut and his didn't, I'd be interested in knowing
what yours said. Also, I hope you didn't create the entry yourself -
self-created entries tend to get deleted as "vanity articles" very quickly.
I hunted around the website to see what policies existed regarding this
issue, and I found this page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_of_vanity_articles
Among the reasons so-called vanity articles get deleted:
"An article about a real person that does not assert that person's
importance or significance - people such as college professors or actors
may be individually important in society; people such as students and
bakers are not, or at least not for the reason of being a student or baker."
Of course, "importance" and "significance" are highly subjective. I'm
guessing that when the wikipedia entry about you was created, someone
came along and didn't see the importance of your work and proposed the
entry should be deleted. If no one then came to argue in support of
keeping your entry, it would be deleted quickly.
Personally, I think you should be in there since you've done so much
significant work in the nonprofit tech field. The key thing would be for
someone to create a first draft that states quite clearly what makes you
and your work important and significant. And I imagine it would help to
be able to include links to media sources where you've been quoted,
acknowledged, etc. And there should be more digital divide activists who
are actings as wikipedians, too, since we know best who's done what, and
what activities are deemed important to the movement.
For whatever reason, Wikipedia seems to lack entries for a lot of people
who've been instrumental in digital divide-related efforts. For example,
I don't see an entry for Larry Irving, who as head of the NTIA during
the Clinton administration almost singlehandedly raised the digital
divide to a policy issue of national importance. It might be an
interesting brainstorm to come up with a list of people who are leaders
in the field that should be included.
andy
------------------------------
Andy Carvin
acarvin (at) edc . org
andycarvin (at) yahoo . com
http://www.digitaldivide.net
http://www.andycarvin.com
------------------------------
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