Groking Wikipedia

I love Wikipedia. After Google, and Yahoo!, it’s my most searched web service.

I visit Wikipedia at least once a day according to my Root Vault.

So I’ve been wanting to spend more time understanding Wikipedia. I’ve edited a few pages over the years but haven’t really spent the time to understand the culture and technology of Wikipedia.

So when I visited the Silicon Alley page that was created by Jason Calacanis and saw that my name linked to a Canadian politician and Jerry Colonna’s name linked to a comedian, I decided to do something about that.

I started by creating a page about me. My plan was to invite all of you to go there and add anything you think is relevant so it’s a true Wikipedia page. But I figured it would be best for me to get the thing going.

But as you’ll see if you go visit the page I created, it’s being considered for deletion because it’s a vanity page. I totally get that. You can’t let people create pages about themselves or Wikipedia would be filled with vanity pages.

In fact, in impressive fashion, within seconds of me creating the page, it was flagged for "speedy deletion" by a community monitor. I put a "hang on" tag on the page and started this discussion about wheter or not the page should be allowed to remain.

So we will see how this plays out. I hope they let it stay up and I hope that those of you who are so inclined will go there and add whatever you think is appropriate. I tried to be inclusive and list my failed investments as well as my successful ones, for example. Truth is what I am looking for, not gloss.

If they do take it down, I’ve saved the work and will send it to anyone who volunteers to put it up under another name. We’ll see how that plays out. I’ll keep you posted.