Adding to Wikipedia for the first time
I wanted to add both Zencoder and Flix Cloud to a list of video editing software on Wikipedia, but Wikipedia is pretty picky about external links. My links got erased after only a day.
To make it more legit, I created these pages: Zencoder, Flix Cloud. I’ll be interested to see how long they last. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the pages I created, in fact I used references more than most other pages I’ve seen, but since my motivation was more on the side of promotion I’m a little nervous. It makes me wonder how any other page about a specific company got on to the wiki if it wasn’t for self promotion. Are there actually people out there who care enough about the completeness of the info that they’ll spend their time doing the necessary research?
Even if there is, it’s still up to the company to maintain the page and make sure no slanderous material gets in there. At APU we used to have to fix changes from Biola students saying we weren’t a Christian university anymore.
Anyway, I’m gonna keep an eye on those pages, and hopefully nobody finds an issue with them.
UPDATE
Um, well, next day:
“A tag has been placed on Flix Cloud, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under the criteria for speedy deletion, because the article seems to be blatant advertising that only promotes a company, product, group, service or person and would need to be fundamentally rewritten in order to become an encyclopedia article. Please read the general criteria for speedy deletion, particularly item 11, as well as the guidelines on spam.
If you can indicate why the subject of this article is not blatant advertising, you may contest the tagging. To do this, please add {{hangon}} on the top of Flix Cloud and leave a note on the article’s talk page explaining your position. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don’t hesitate to add information to the article that would help make it encyclopedic, as well as adding any citations from independent reliable sources to ensure that the article will be verifiable. Feel free to leave a note on my talk page if you have any questions about this. Jim Ward (talk·stalk) 23:56, 16 April 2009 (UTC)”
I’ll admit, I did a slightly better job on the Zencoder entry, which seems to be surviving. I still used independent resources as references, but I didn’t have any thing like “Founded in 2008 by blah blah”. Oh well. I’ll try again later.