On Wednesday, 6 February 2013 at 08:20, Charles Matthews wrote:
Notability is *supposed* to be timeless, not
perishable, let's recall.
DG raises an interesting writing issue, nevertheless. Remember Pownce?
This is the startup over which Andrew Lih went ballistic - with risk
of distortion in my hindsight, the point at the time was that Lih
thought a press release about a Silicon Valley startup was quite
enough for an encyclopedia article, while other disagreed. As things
now stand
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pownce
tells us it went down one of the startup routes, for a lifespan of
around 18 months.
That article seems fine, except that "The developers have also
created" should now read "The developers also created".
Pownce is clearly a footnote by now. One of WP's purposes is to host
such footnotes. So the writing issue boils down to reducing froth to
footnote coverage.
Pownce is an interesting example of why we need to keep these kinds of
articles around: every time a new social network comes along, people
jump on to it like it's the best thing since sliced bread. Showing them the
many failures and closed services may prompt them into reconsidering
their actions.
Not that Wikipedia ought to moralise or preach, but the lesson of reading
articles like Pownce is that Silicon Valley venture capitalists don't value
things for longevity. And a lot of people seem to forget that.
"Those who don't learn from history are bound to repeat it" applies to
technology and business too.
--
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>