Aussie Tech-Focused Wiki Launched 155
daria42 writes "Wikipedia's great for some things — like looking up the in-depth history of 4chan, for example — but not great for others, such as finding out the micro-history of the technology sector in certain countries. That's why Australian technology publication Delimiter has launched a public wiki site purely focused on the Australian technology sector — its personalities, issues, companies, and events. Already the site has better coverage of some areas than Wikipedia, leading to the question of whether more such small wikis should be created for certain verticals."
Abstract says it all (Score:5, Funny)
Wikipedia's great for some things — like looking up the in-depth history of 4chan
That is what is wrong with Wikipedia.
Re:Abstract says it all (Score:5, Funny)
That is what is wron^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
There, I deleted it for ya.
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I managed to take a snapshot of your crime
(See the history if you cannot see it)
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8 Pages, and 3 of them are test entries, and two are one-liners. Extremely slow news day? :\
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Seriously. Well, now there's like 19 or 20, but still: seriously.
I don't really have any complaint with this, but it's a teeny bit early to begin bragging about how much better than Wikipedia you are, eh?
http://www.delimiter.com.au/wiki/index.php?title=Neptune_Informatics [delimiter.com.au] - Look now they've been trolled, too. Rock.
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You can't really conclude that. That'd be more to do with the fact that the site is less than 12 hours 'old', so not many users have written entries for it yet (and for that matter, there aren't many users yet).
The tech sector in Australia is no smaller or bigger than in any other similar sized country AFAIK. Most of it is dominated by the usual multinational suspects (MS, IBM, Oracle, HP, Novell etc.) but there are a few Australian companies that are fairly substantial in size (although these are primarily
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"You can't really conclude that. That'd be more to do with the fact that the site is less than 12 hours 'old', so not many users have written entries for it yet.."
In another 12 hours, access will be blocked by the moron govt. because somebody cited too much from a copyrighted handbook or manual.
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Advantage? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:broken into thousands of subdomains? (Score:1, Insightful)
But isn't the internet really just thousands of sub domains? And it's useful right? Even the Wikipedia folks seem to think that it is okay to have many sources of "fact" see also links aka references at the end of each Wikipedia entry. Is this a Wikipedia issue or just a problem with somebody else calling their user create collection of "facts" a wiki? I like Wikipedia and appreciate when people add to it but refuse to limit myself when people choose to maintain their own website(s) even ones that happen to
Re:Advantage? (Score:5, Interesting)
Distinct wikis are quite sensible when dealing with matters that aren't within Wikipedia's area of interest(the dedicated Star Wars and Star Trek wikis, among others, would be a bit much shoehorned in to wikipedia proper, for instance). In this case, though, the Australian tech industry would seem to be as logical a candidate for entry into standard Wikipedia as any other country's, if perhaps understandably less heavily contributed.
Assuming that the license isn't something totally off the wall, somebody could probably do a more or less automatic mass import; but it still seems sort of pointless.
Stack Overflow vs. ExpertS-exChange (Score:2)
When you get right down to it, what we are seeing here is basically the same thing we saw that came out of stack overflow. Jeff Atwood and co realised that sites like yahoo answers were a good idea but once you included all people into the debate about something very particular you basically get a mess of /b/arstards cloggin up the system. And that is how you got stack overflow.
I always thought Stack Overflow was created out of frustration with ExpertS-exChange's paywall.
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Oh, come on now -- you want to ruin it, just for a moment of making yourself feel smart on Slashdot, of all places?
If everyone's peeking over, they'll be forced to raise the wall...
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Re:Advantage? (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you ever tried to create or edit articles in Wikipedia?
I've had dentist visits which were less painful.
I've dealt with powerhungry asshole admins in fps games who were more understanding.
I've dealt with complex series of rules (i.e. United States Tax Code) which are easier to circumnavigate than Wikipedia's ego-driven drivel.
And my edits were on non-mainstream articles.
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Have you ever tried to create or edit articles in Wikipedia?
I've had dentist visits which were less painful.
I've dealt with powerhungry asshole admins in fps games who were more understanding.
I've dealt with complex series of rules (i.e. United States Tax Code) which are easier to circumnavigate than Wikipedia's ego-driven drivel.
And my edits were on non-mainstream articles.
I concur, we need a wikipedia like tool dumb down to a myspace/geocites level
Wikia (Score:2)
I concur, we need a wikipedia like tool dumb down to a myspace/geocites level
This exists. It used to be called Wikicities and is now called Wikia. Essentially it's a set of wikis for everything that won't fit in an encyclopedia. And I recommend it for any vertical [wikipedia.org] that can stand the ads.
Re:Advantage? (Score:4, Insightful)
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(That's why.)
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Why not use the effort in creating articles in an entirely new wiki to instead improve or add articles for Wikipedia?
Because your work is likely to be deleted. Not every little tech company meets wikipedia's notability standards.
A few years ago, I added a bunch of pages on CMSs, and especially open source enterprise CMSs, to the Dutch wikipedia. Some of those were immediately deleted because it wasn't interesting enough and few other articles linked to them, although I imagine a lot of people would be interested in that sort of info. A specialised tech wiki would definitely help out there.
Of course it'd be nice if that in
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Wikipedia can't be the solution to every information-gathering problem. And despite some slogans to the contrary, it clearly doesn't want to be. It has policies of Notabiliy, No Original Research, and Neutral Point of View that effectively make it unsuitable for certain information. If you want in-depth, exhaustive information about other topics, you consult a more specialized resource, such as drum and bugle corps [drumcorpswiki.com], Star Wars [wookiepedia.org], Star Trek [memory-alpha.org], garden flowers [gardenology.org], movies [imdb.com], Pokémon [bulbagarden.net], Peter Pan [peterphile.info], travel [wikitravel.org], alternate [conservapedia.com]
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On the flipside, why should they contribute to the Wikipedia?
Quite the contrary. The internet has show us again and again that One Site To Rule Them All is an idea that simply doesn't work all that well.
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That's not a wiki, THIS is a wiki (Score:2)
Put the word "Wikipedia" in quotes like me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Aussie Tech-Focused Wikipedia Launched
No, it wasn't. Some business in Australia unconnected with the Wikimedia crowd decided to put up their own wiki (running MediaWiki, like half of the other wikis out there). Good for them.
Why didn't Slashdot cover it when Penny Arcade got their own Wikipedia [wikia.com] ? Oh wait, it was because that didn't happen, the same way Australia didn't get their own Wikipedia for technology.
Anyhow, if someone's going to give the Land Down Under their own honest-to-goodness Wikipedia wiki, I think it should be about ways to get rid of invasive species. Any Aussies here? You've got what: rabbits, poisonous toads, some kind of insect, and.... what else?
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Any Aussies here? You've got what: rabbits, poisonous toads, some kind of insect, and.... what else?
Much of Australia's wildlife has been decimated by introduced species. You left out foxes, cats, carp and I think the insect you refer to is the European wasp, or maybe it is fire ants, both of which are wild.
Probably the worst invasive species is Homo sapiens, which brought in all the other species (that includes our indigenous people, who introduced the dingo a few thousand years ago, decimating wildlife on
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the next most destructive animal to arrive would have to be the cane toad. it out competes native frogs, anything that eats it dies and we still don't have anyway of stopping it.
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Fair call, but what about the other x-thousand species?
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Er, what? Eucalypts prove the poster's point. They're so well-suited to surviving Australian bushfires they dominated the continent. If you're going to link wikipedia, I suggest http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucalyptus [wikipedia.org] which goes into considerably more detail. For a relevant excerpt, "With the arrival of the first humans about 50 thousand years ago, fires became much more frequent and the fire-loving eucalypts soon came to account for roughly 70% of Australian forest."
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Restricting the conversation to seriously destructive imports I'd say the next ones would be cats, foxes and european carp.
Particularly cats, disgusting destructive pest animals those things are.
Re:Put the word "Wikipedia" in quotes like me... (Score:5, Funny)
I think it should be about ways to get rid of invasive species. Any Aussies here? You've got what: rabbits, poisonous toads, some kind of insect, and.... what else?
New Zealanders. ;)
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Re:Put the word "Wikipedia" in quotes like me... (Score:4, Funny)
I can only assume you're talking about the work required to staff the dole office for all the attending Kiwis? ;)
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Rats, mice, goats, deer, pigs, hare, water buffalo, camels, horses, donkeys, cats, dogs, foxes, argentine ants, elm bettle, cane bettle (despite the toads that were introduced to eat them), fruit fly, European wasp, carp, trout, starlings, sparrows, Indian miners, blackbirds, song thrush, and a heap of plant species.
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Yes, I did.
"My uncle is an Indian miner out in WA"
Has he dug up any Indians lately?
If you do an in-place update add an "UPDATE" line! (Score:2)
Just so the history books understand my rant, the title used to be:
Aussie Tech-Focused Wikipedia Launched
...and now it's magically changed to
Aussie Tech-Focused Wiki Launched
See, there's no "Updated on date blah blah by timothy: line as there is in most updated slashdot articles [slashdot.org].
Maybe Slashdot needs its own Wikiped... I mean, Wiki. Then we'd get version control for free!
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Re:Put the word "Wikipedia" in quotes like me... (Score:4, Funny)
we managed to get rid of one of the biggest parasitic specimens of them all and dump him on to the unsuspecting population of the US: Rupert Murdoch
you naturalised him, you keep him!
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Of course! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah, I've maintain a 20,000 article wiki about a specific topic and every time I've made even minor changes to the topic's article on wikipedia they get reverted/changed to inaccurate statements and so then I end up spending half a day looking up arcane wikipedia rules to justify my edits (which eventually stand up) but only after all the hassle of fighting with the reverters/deletionists.
After a while I just said screw it and don't bother anymore.
If I can find the time (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm much more inclined towards dumping my archives and knowledge of the Australian computer industry, especially from the 1980s when I was in the loop with many key players, into something like this than trying to make more than the most minor edits to Wikipedia itself.
For some time I've been saying it would be best if Wikipedia could connect relatively seamlessly with specialised wikis where each local or narrow community could manage their own authentication process.
If I could find some way of better covering living expenses short of selling my soul to assist somebody else's agenda, I could easily spend a hopefully longish retirement working mostly on similar projects. The only problem is that I'm sitting on at least half a dozen other areas where I have more again that should be made available and I doubt Aubrey de Grey is going to keep me alive long enough to get them all done.
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This sort of happens. Different areas have different groups of active editors who tend to be the main participants in discussions, and different norms end up prevailing. Some of them are even codified, so e.g. academics [wikipedia.org] and fiction [wikipedia.org] have their own separate notability policies. It happens even more as areas ge
seems hard overall (Score:2)
If these people really are notable, even in a niche, and there are decent references to cite for their articles, Wikipedia will eventually create articles for them.
There are ways to keep a specialist encyclopedia ahead of Wikipedia's coverage of that specialty, but they usually involve having a lot of expert authors, and/or decades of previous work that's hard to replicate. For example, Wikipedia's coverage of classical Greek and Rome isn't as good as one of the massive multi-volume encyclopedia sets on the
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2005 called; They want their optimism about Wikipedia back.
Amazing! (Score:5, Funny)
hmm (Score:4, Funny)
Re:hmm (Score:4, Insightful)
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Dialect, not accent.
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Swiss army (Score:2)
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Whoosh.
Maybe this [wikipedia.org] will help. While we're at it, do the Swiss have a Navy?
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It doesn't help that hardly anyone speaks with the accent they're aiming for anyway. The only people I know who speak live that are from up in the far north. Personally, my favourite Australian accent is the one used in old ABC documentaries (like A Big Country), which would be relatively easy for English actors to imitate, and my least favourite is the Melburnian accent, with its ghastly short vowels (a dislike which has nothing to do with state predjudice), although AIUI some northeastern US accents are s
Re:hmm (Score:5, Funny)
You haven't picked up that they're making fun of you yet?
leading to ... (Score:2)
WTF are you on about? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wikipedia doesn't want full depth coverage of specific areas. Once they wanted to contain the "sum of human knowledge" (including catch rates for pokemon) but these days they want to be an online encyclopaedia based on reputable sources. They encourage you to go off and make your own wiki if you want to have deep coverage of a particular area.
For example the article on 4chan contains superficial background information. There is another entire wiki dedicated to the full history of 4chan and the memes it generates. The wikipedia article focuses on Project Chanology and /b/ because that is probably what got 4chan the most press coverage (which is what wikipedia admins like to base articles on, but hardly covers all knowledge of a subject).
Wikipedia wants you to write encyclopedia articles. They don't just want an infodump of "non-encyclopaedic" information. If you do the latter they will tell you to take you "non-notable fancruft" to another wiki.
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Looking at the significant number of infodumps of "non-encyclopaedic" information that Wikipedia has... I really wonder about that. Every damm minor pornstar has his or her own article (usually a stub). Every damm player who ever wore a uniform for a major sports team has his or here on article (
Re:Notability (Score:5, Informative)
That's not really true. I've personally written articles on obscure German politicians, for example, and gotten no pushback at all. If you write a decent stub, and include a few citations to reputable sources, nobody will even blink at it. The citations don't even have to be in English--- a cite to some mainstream German newspapers, or to the Neue Deutsche Biographie, is plenty.
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The problem is, if something is not notable in the USA, then it is not notable for Wikipedia at all.
Bullshit. [wikipedia.org]
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The problem is, if something is not notable in the USA, then it is not notable for Wikipedia at all.
There is an article on my last name. 0.0001% of the population of the USA shares my last name, which is Aramaic. Hell, most people trip over the spelling/speaking of it since two of the letters in it are never seen in that order in any English word. (Even though it's only 6 letters long, it really trips up people due to that reversal)
But again, it's certainly not of ANY real relevance to the US, other than
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Aramaic would be seven letter long, wouldn't it?
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You know that ...I know that .... but the rest of the English speaking world does not know if you made it up unless you cite a source ....
You did, they stopped nominating it for deletion .... that's how Wikipedia is *supposed* to work ...
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If it has Cites that appear relevant then I leave things alone, If I know what I am talking about then I check them ...
Articles without cites get spotted by bots, and will get at least a "need cites" message with a timeout to be deleted
I agree some people do appear to be overeager to delete articles, and some people will, without knowing the subject, question all the citations, but this is how it is supposed to work ...
I had never heard of Matt Cutts, Now I do and it looks to be a well cited article and so
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...Eric, Larry, Sergy I knew of ... Marissa Mayer It didn't ....shows how much I pay attention to Google's internal staff!
I agree if it's cited at all then unless I know the subject I won't judge the cites, but if it's not cited then I assume it might be "just made up" ....
Wikia? (Score:2)
Isn't that was wikia does? It lets people set up specific wikis on specific subjects that cover things in more depth than would be allowed by wikipedia due to article notability standards?
That's kind of a duh statement.
No, and yes (Score:4, Insightful)
Probably would have been roughly as effective to publish an article in a major mag or popular blog saying "Hey, we need more coverage in wikipedia, please contribute."
Why is this worse? Because the small wikis don't have the infrastructure. Financial, technical, and human resources- the volunteers who have spent years figuring out the best available way to do stuff, Etc. etc.
On the plus side, something relatively obscure gets shuffled off into its own wiki. I only wish the same could be said of all the extensive articles on various fictional universes...
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Probably would have been roughly as effective to publish an article in a major mag or popular blog saying "Hey, we need more coverage in wikipedia, please contribute."
As several other comments to this article have pointed, out, smaller wikis have different standards of inclusion and thus won't necessarily be so trigger-happy on the delete button. Do you want to have to train every contributor on the fine points of defending a particular source's reliability?
Not notable (Score:4, Insightful)
There's also the fact that wikipedia removes anything "not notable." What is "not notable" is usually whatever a bunch of wikipedia bureaucrats decide. Wikipedia, being run by your traditional fatnerd, is more likely to label this sort of stuff as "not notable" as opposed to something they would find notable (like the made-up histories of individual Final Fantasy characters or the stats of pokemon characters).
Re:Not notable (Score:4, Informative)
General comments against Wikipedia notability get modded up because most people have had something deleted. Specific comments that specify what got deleted get modded down because most of the time it wasn't actually notable at all.
I'm not all talk, though. If anyone reading this ever actually is the victim of some beaurocrat's arbitrary preferences, leave me a message [wikipedia.org] and I'll make sure any article that passes the inclusion requirements gets to stay. There's a whole Article Rescue Squadron [wikipedia.org] full of people who are willing to do something about the problem instead of just whining about it on Slashdot. Yeah, I get it, "I don't have the time to join a Wikipedia group, Wikipedia can go fuck itself, it's a lost cause"... but you've got plenty of time to complain about it here.
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On the contrary, I used to edit wikipedia, I know exactly what sorts of games you wikipedia bureaucrats play. It's exactly like nerds are trying to roleplay a bureaucracy. I'm glad I stopped trying to contribute to that site a long time ago.
Though, my reasons had little to do with notability. Although I should mention that something can be put up for a vote over and over again until it finally passes, in which case it can't be easily put up again; you guys did that to the GNAA article, after all.
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In other words, if you can pile up enough authoritative looking 'sources', the article becomes notable by sheer weight of footnotes.
And here we see a symptom of exactly the reason that many people avoid dealing with Wikipedia, th
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I used to work at a soup kitchen, but I got tired of all the beaurocracy. Once I made a pot of soup that didn't meet their byzantine sanitation requirements, and they threw it out! An insult to my perfect cooking! Screw that.
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Yes, utterly irrelevant crap is so useful. You're a shining example of precisely why people are avoiding getting involved in Wikipedia in ever growing droves.
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Well, of course... (Score:5, Insightful)
Already the site has better coverage of some areas than Wikipedia, leading to the question of whether more such small Wikis should be created for certain verticals.
Wikipedia aims to be a general encyclopedia, larger and more thorough than any print encyclopedia to be sure, but it's still a general reference. Of course more specific references should be created. It's not like this is a new idea: search Amazon for books titled Encyclopedia of... and you'll find thousands, many (though probably not most) of which are serious scholarly works.
Excepting mathematics and the sciences, which are arguably applicable to the whole of human experience in one way or another, practically every other area of human knowledge has a highly specialized audience to one degree or another. Every last possible detail about pre-1947 aircraft engines, for example, might be of great interest to aerospace historians and engineers, but it's probably not of much interest to anyone else. Or an encyclopedic reference to every last town in Ohio might be hugely interesting to Ohioans and genealogists, and at least occasionally significant to broader research, but again, of limited interest to the general public. Unless Wikipedia (and its donors) are prepared to maintain a comprehensive reference to the entire body of human knowledge, specialist references are unavoidable.
Finally, the quality of the articles in those specialist references might be higher than in Wikipedia. Every field has sloppy researchers and trolls, of course, but a relatively specialized field probably has a smaller proportion of both than would be attracted to a general reference, within certain limits, e.g., one could reasonably expect a wiki devoted to quaternions to have better writers and fewer trolls than AbortionPedia.
I want a sum-of-all-knowledge-opedia. (Score:5, Insightful)
I want a wiki that contains a coredump of all human knowledge, notable or not. I'd get stuck in even worse wikiloops.
You know about some obscure film that was a knockoff of batman produced by 2 Chileans and a Russian in Azerbaijan in 1974?
BRING IT ON. I want to know the life story of the three producer/director/actors as well. What the name of their third cat was. What brand of cigarettes they smoked. Everything is notable.
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Then just start it. I'll happily contribute the article "List of positive integer numbers which have exactly two digits when written in standard decimal notation without leading zeros." Yes, I know those numbers! :-)
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Talking of Australia, Batman and Wikipedia...
Did you know Melbourne, Australia (or technically the town that became Melbourne) was founded by John Batman [wikipedia.org] and he named the land Batmania. I shit you not.
Crackipedia? (Score:2)
Freebase has no notability criteria. Its only criteria is your data be in structured format, basically.
That, and you need to smoke crack [wikipedia.org] first.
Another god damn PR bullshit (Score:2, Interesting)
Despite all the whining about slashdot "editors", I'd rather have them pick stories, rather than these PR marketing bullshit submitted.
I really hate to use such language, but "slashdot" has a brand value. Don't destory it.
Already Exists in some ways (Score:4, Informative)
A "wiki for Australian technology" already exists in a way, though mostly focused on the internet: it's the Whirlpool.net Wiki [whirlpool.net.au]. Brilliant resource.
Two different things (Score:2)
Apart from a bunch of data pages on locally prominent sports, Whirlpool is very much a now reference.
Delimiter seems to be aiming more for a sociological view of Australian IT.
For me the simple test was Microbee, the only locally developed computer which ever gained significant market share and which is prominent in Delimiter's wiki [delimiter.com.au] but absent from Whirlpool.
Clearly the publicity here is already doing some Delimiter good as there are already quite a few more pages and categories than when I looked a few hou
Already done (Score:5, Informative)
Surely Whirlpool's wiki is an 'Aussie tech-focused wikipedia', and it's already got thousands of mature articles, e.g.
A series of articles on working in IT industry in Australia:
http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/?tag=it_telco
A comprehensive guide to PC parts, prices and specs:
http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/?tag=rmp_sg_whirlpoolpcs
Where have you been for the last six years? (Score:2)
So he invented a small-scale wikia? (Score:2)
Wow, this is NEWS! I am sure there is a Wiki with more furry-related information than Wikipedia, too. Do I care? No. Does it appear on /.? No. And a good thing, also.
Verticals (Score:2)
The first time I heard a sales guy use the term "verticals," I stopped him because I had no idea what that meant. He said that verticals are markets - health care, construction, etc. I said, "so a vertical is an industry?" Yep, he said.
I still hear the term a lot and think it's useless. To me, "vertical" implies a chain of processes leading towards a finished product. For example, the old railroad tycoons wou
What's the magic difference? (Score:2)
Wikipedia already links to zillions of external websites for deeper cover on a topic - why should a detailed history of the Australian tech industry be any different?
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Wikipedia would have this, and lots of other content, if there wasn't those guys who are known as The Deletionists who pretty much delete every article which isn't controversial mess. Non-controversial topics don't have many people keeping a close eye on them, and when they get flagged for deletion, nobody really notices that before too late.
"Australian technology, what's that? Never heard, DELETE!"
I just found that there's a Wikipedia entry deletionism and inclusionism in Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] despite the fact that this clearly isn't what you would normally consider encyclopedic material. I wonder why the deletionists didn't delete it.
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One of the major roadblocks is "NO ORIGINAL RESEARCH" doctrine.
If your sources are not quotable (say, you know some a traditional technique that was passed from father to son), if the sources are obscure (a photo with a name tag, in a school's yearbook, school already closed, yearbook in town's archives), if the sources are volatile (you write the article on a current event as you hear it reported over the radio), if the sources are inaccessible for wider public (you publish an article on ancient text in a
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The problem is that Wikipedia accepts only stuff printed on paper as source (its not quite, but close enough), this makes it close to impossible in some regions to write content. Look at homebrew on consoles, you can find tons of information about it out there or just try it yourself, but you hardly find anything about it in the mainstream press or ever the gaming press. The best you can find is some rather useless generic talk that doesn't tell you more then "it exists". The reason for that is simply that