Pit Schultz on Fri, 2 Feb 2007 07:25:25 +0100 (CET)


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Re: <nettime> shocklogs wikipedia entry


there are many examples like this. wikipedians are quite tolerant to
people adding their own names if they play in a band etc. but neologisms
do not easily get in, especially if they are derivates of established ones -
mostly when they do not pass the "google test". if a notion is not 
established
with maybe 20 to 30 sources, it tends to get deleted. once you got it on
boingboing it??s widely found. see bruce sterling??s "spime".

so does this open some chances to SEO and viral marketing
spin doctoring?  certainly many companies would love to attach themselves to
neologisms, this is one of the sources of this suspicious editing culture.
it is rarely without a self interest that
someone fights to get a certain notion established early.
once it is established it is sometimes harder to prove that it was just you
who invented it, so here you have the analogy to company brands.

we had a similar debate in 2004 arround the establishment of
"freies kulturradio" on the german wikipedia. there is was clearly
the community of "freies radio" and "kulturradio" who didn??t like
the term. even if there are a few radios using it today, it didn??t got
established widely or survived more than a few months on wikipedia.de

the issue with foreign language is really simple. if sources are in dutch,
get it on the dutch wikipedia. that has nothing
to do with nationalism but with language. it will be certainly
no problem to use an english name either, in fact it could be
just a dutch phenomenon?

see handy in germany, it is used for mobile phones, sounds
english, but is only to be found on the german wikipedia.
(ok, millions of people use this word..)

the question is much more would it be possible to get this
term into any other jargon watch, dictionary or language book
first? if this is possible than wikipedia would have a problem, else it is
hard to decide where vanity publishing starts and where  pluralism ends.


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