BBC Radio 4 is making a big 100-part radio series called A History of the World in 100 Objects.

The production team would like to write a new Wikipedia entry about the series. Chris Thorne explains below why he thinks we need the article. You'll see that he references the new system here that uses Wikipedia as a controlled vocabulary for category and topic pages.

Would it be legitimate to create a Wikipedia entry for the series? The series starts in the new year but is already moderately notable via some newspaper articles and information on the BBC and British Museum web sites.

What do you think?

Steve

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We need a new wikipedia article writing, about A History of the World in 100 objects, and we need to get it approved by wikipedia.

You being one of these social media experts, and aware of all those issues around how to get it into wikipedia, suitable tone etc, I wondered if you might be able to do it?

For citations, there is stuff in Google (times articles et al)

http://www.google.co.uk/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUK312&a... +history+of+the+world+in+a+100+objects&btnG=Google+Search&meta=lr%3D&aq= f&oq=

Thoughts?

C

PS the reason why im asking is that there is a new tagging system coming, whereby you can only tag episodes with terms that have a page in wikipedia. We want to be able to tag episodes with 'A history of the world in 100 objects' therefore we need a page creating in wikipedia. Unfortunatly, because it takes a while to get the wikipedia articles to generate tags, the sooner an article can exist, the better.

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2009/9/18 Steve Bowbrick Steve.Bowbrick@bbc.co.uk:

BBC Radio 4 is making a big 100-part radio series called A History of the World in 100 Objects.

The production team would like to write a new Wikipedia entry about the series. Chris Thorne explains below why he thinks we need the article. You'll see that he references the new system here that uses Wikipedia as a controlled vocabulary for category and topic pages.

Would it be legitimate to create a Wikipedia entry for the series? The series starts in the new year but is already moderately notable via some newspaper articles and information on the BBC and British Museum web sites.

What do you think?

Yes, it sounds notable. The key issue I can see is that, if it is the BBC writing it, there is a real danger of original research. Everything that goes in the Wikipedia article needs to have been published somewhere else first (that radio series itself is a publication, although you need to be careful when using primary sources like that).

If someone from the BBC does write it they need to make it very clear they are from the BBC - I suggest a note to that effect on their user page and on the talk page for the article. Ideally you should request that someone else write the article and just list the sources they should use.

PS the reason why im asking is that there is a new tagging system coming, whereby you can only tag episodes with terms that have a page in wikipedia. We want to be able to tag episodes with 'A history of the world in 100 objects' therefore we need a page creating in wikipedia. Unfortunatly, because it takes a while to get the wikipedia articles to generate tags, the sooner an article can exist, the better.

I'm not sure I like the sound of that. Wikipedia in an encyclopaedia, our articles are about encyclopaedic topics. I can't see any reason why your tags should be exclusively encyclopaedia topics. I rather suspect this is a case of using the wrong tool for the job.