And the winner is…

On: October 5, 2010
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About Lotte Woerde
Lotte Woerde graduated as a graphic designer at Willem de Kooning Art Academy and finished her BA in Television Studies at UvA. Since 2005 she is running her own graphic design company, called Lot concept & ontwerp bno, based in Amsterdam. As an independent graphic designer Lotte worked together with creative media companies like Glamcult Studio, Technicolor and NOS. Her area of interest concerns the intersection between new media and design concepts and solutions. Currently she is a MA student of New Media.

Website
http://www.lotontwerpt.nl    

This week I took my fist shaky steps on the Wikipedia. I was supposed to because of this week’s assignment, but I wasn’t quite enthusiastic. Wikipedia barbarian as I was, I thought it would be quite easy to create and edit pages. I was thus a little bit laconic about it. Before this week, I never understood people who created and edited pages on Wikipedia. Why would one share his knowledge with the whole world, without getting any recognition? And above that: why would one create a text under the circumstance that someone else can change it easily? Not my piece of cake.

First of all, it wasn’t easy at all to create a Wikipedia page. For instance, I had to think of a subject. That wasn’t hard. In last week’s assignment I tried to link the term post advertising to a Wikipedia page and I then already discovered there wasn’t any. So I took my change and created one. I thought making it easy for myself to enter the Dutch Wikipedia, with 643.347 entries much smaller that the English version of the website (3.432.142 entries). I created the entry under my user account, because then I would have the chance to edit it a bit longer before the Wikipedia editors and the bots would discover and had the chance to destroy it. But after two minutes I already got a message from ‘the Wikipedia’. The page was about to be deleted. Why? There was not given any explanation. After our teacher John and I stared at the screen for a minute, the message disappeared magically and I was able to follow the yellow brick road again.

Soon I discovered there wasn’t much to tell about post advertising, it is just an other word for content marketing, made up by a large advertising company. I ended up with a Wikipedia page not much larger than ten sentences. But I posted it anyway. Only ten minutes after, I already got the message that it was soon to be removed. This time I got an explanation. The page was removed because the term post advertising was also the name of a commercial website (postadvertising.com). So although I wrote an objective posting, and never mentioned the name of the company who made up the term, the Wikipedia-people or –bots discovered the link to the commercial website of the company.

I actually understood the reasons of Wikipedia to delete my post advertising post and didn’t have the illusion that I could win the game. So I adjusted to the rules and tried something else. In the mean time, I had become a bit of a fanatic Wikipedia user. Although I still don’t like writing stuff that someone else can edit, I like games. And I started to experience Wikipedia as a game.  So I decided I was ready to enter the English Wikipedia.

Glamcult cover

This time I tried claiming my spot on Wikipedia with Dutch magazine Glamcult. It was founded in 2003 by friends of mine and I thought that they deserve to be on Wikipedia. So I wrote a few lines and placed it. Already in a few hours I got the message that my post was soon to be deleted, because Glamcult is a non-notable magazine. I couldn’t of course  let someone say that about my friend’s hard work, so I started a discussion with Wikipedia. I told them that a magazine that has exclusive interviews with Mario Testino and Victor & Rolf is not a non-notable magazine. And that Glamcult is seen as one of the leading magazines on style and is very popular. I deleted the message of Wikipedia.

That was yesterday. It is still there.
I won!

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