Wizard's Blog

I have created my first Wikipedia article – Zemanta.

I’ve been using Zemanta since March 2008, and I was surprised that it didn’t have a Wikipedia article.

I’ve been planning on creating an article for Zemanta for a long time, but Wikipedia is pretty intimidating.  There are a lot of rules about what you can write about and how you write it – if you do it wrong up they might unilaterally delete your article.  Added to that is the fact that wikis use a unique kind of meta-data that I needed to learn, and I just ended up putting it off week after week.

In the end what worked was telling my wife to nag me to get it done.  I guess that goes to show a negative can be turned into a positive  Considering how easy it turned out to be, I feel foolish having put it off at all.

As you can see, the article is pretty bare at the moment because I was concentrating on just providing referenced facts without bias – it can always be fleshed out (by me or anyone with relevant knowledge) later.

Wikipedia have obviously put a lot of work into providing FAQ’s, tutorials and help sections for beginners like me, but I’d say they still have a long way to go.  I spent the vast majority of the time just trying to find answers to simple questions.

While writing the article I found several things that should have Wikipedia articles but don’t, for example Common Tag, LinkWithin and Outbrain.  If my first article is well received (or at least not immediately deleted) I might write some more.

EDIT: Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks that Wikipedia is less welcoming to new contributors – After the boom, is Wikipedia heading for bust?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Wikipedia engulfed in row over Rorschach tests (telegraph.co.uk)
• Wikipedia in a Physical Form (prathambooks.org)

Image via CrunchBase

Today I saw an announcement that a WordPress plugin called Outbrain had added support for Disqus, so the two plugins can automatically cooperate if they’re both installed.

I’ve installed it and so far it seems pretty cool - Outbrain lets visitors to my blog rate my posts, we’ll see whether any visitors make use of it and what they think.  It also gives stats on the ratings.

I did have some problems installing it – you get a claim code from their website and enter it into the plugin.  This proves that you own your blog and lets you begin using the plugin.  My claim process kept timing out and then suddenly it worked – it may have been a server-side problem, or because I initially just used my domain name instead of the path to my blog.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Outbrain offers Disqus integration
• Outbrain Offers Bloggers More Data with Reports Dashboard