On Wednesday, 6 February 2013 at 08:20, Charles Matthews wrote: > Notability is *supposed* to be timeless, not perishable, let's recall. > > DG raises an interesting writing issue, nevertheless. Remember Pownce? > This is the startup over which Andrew Lih went ballistic - with risk > of distortion in my hindsight, the point at the time was that Lih > thought a press release about a Silicon Valley startup was quite > enough for an encyclopedia article, while other disagreed. As things > now stand > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pownce > > tells us it went down one of the startup routes, for a lifespan of > around 18 months. > > That article seems fine, except that "The developers have also > created" should now read "The developers also created". > > Pownce is clearly a footnote by now. One of WP's purposes is to host > such footnotes. So the writing issue boils down to reducing froth to > footnote coverage.
Pownce is an interesting example of why we need to keep these kinds of articles around: every time a new social network comes along, people jump on to it like it's the best thing since sliced bread. Showing them the many failures and closed services may prompt them into reconsidering their actions. Not that Wikipedia ought to moralise or preach, but the lesson of reading articles like Pownce is that Silicon Valley venture capitalists don't value things for longevity. And a lot of people seem to forget that. "Those who don't learn from history are bound to repeat it" applies to technology and business too. -- Tom Morris <http://tommorris.org/> _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
