Thursday, June 25, 2009

Wikipedia entry about to be deleted!


Here's what happened. After the release of Spinward Fringe Frontline the Wikipedia page a very kind reader started for me became badly out of date. Thinking that it was important for an encyclopedia, even Wikipedia, to be up to date I took the initiative and marked Frontline as available, added the ISBN and added Spinward Fringe Rogue Element as an upcoming novel.

Now someone's come along and marked it as an advertizement and as containing material not appropriate for an encyclopedia.

Frankly, if it were written as an advertizement it would contain a synopsis of each book, a tag line for each series, pictures of each cover and it would contain a whole lot more marketable links. I have places for that, here for example, so I don't need Wikipedia for that at all. In fact a pleasent bio and a list of books by year is appropriate for an encyclopedia and should be listed in Wiki since a solid number of readers have come in contact with my work.

This blog post isn't meant as a call to war against Wiki, however. Someone who was more paranoid than they ought to be pushed the panic button over there and I really have no idea what to do about it. All I do know is that Wikipedia has a notion that if the subject of an entry (me), modifies its contents it immediately becomes advertising. So that leaves me with one real option.

I have to ask you good people to make some kind of modification that will get my entry off the deletion list. I honestly don't know much about the back end of Wikipedia, so I can't tell you how this is done but if something isn't done soon I'll be off Wikipedia, sad.

This is my humble appeal for help, if you want or need any information that doesn't involve coding (which I really know nothing about), then just send me an email and I'll see if I can help.

RL

EDIT:
You can also help my Wikipedia page from being deleted by adding your comments about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Randolph_Lalonde

1 comment:

Neil said...

Wikipedia itself says (on the discussion page) that your article is part of the Biography wikipedia project. The page reads like a biography, so it should be suitable. As with all wikipedia pages, sources for all information is important, so maybe someone isn't happy with there being only 2 sources in the references section? Just a guess.