48. Wikipedia Article Entry on Bitcoin

48

Wikipedia Article Entry on Bitcoin

WE CANNOT IMAGINE that Wikipedia would consider deleting the entry on Bitcoin with its current level of interest. At the time of this post, Bitcoin was still under $1, but was generating sufficient interest to justify an article in Wikipedia. Satoshi comments here that he considers the timing strange, as coverage of Bitcoin was rapidly increasing in the media.

Re: They want to delete the Wikipedia article

Satoshi Nakamoto July 20, 2010, 06:38:28 PM

Quote from: Giulio Prisco July 14, 2010, 07:21:08 AM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin

This article is being considered for deletion in accordance with Wikipedia’s deletion policy.Please share your thoughts on the matter at this article’s entry on the Articles for deletion page.

This article needs references that appear in reliable third-party publications. Primary sources or sources affiliated with the subject are generally not sufficient for a Wikipedia article. Please add more appropriate citations from reliable sources.

The recent Slashdot article should be considered as a reliable reference: http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/07/11/1747245/Bitcoin-Releases-Version-03

I cannot edit at this moment, can you guys save the WPartcile?

Bitcoin is an implementation of Wei Dai’s b-money proposal http://weidai.com/bmoney.txt on Cypherpunks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunks in 1998 and Nick Szabo’s Bitgold proposal http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html

The timing is strange, just as we are getting a rapid increase in 3rd party coverage after getting slashdotted. I hope there’s not a big hurry to wrap the discussion and decide. How long does Wikipedia typically leave a question like that open for comment?

It would help to condense the article and make it less promotional sounding as soon as possible. Just letting people know what it is, where it fits into the electronic money space, not trying to convince them that it’s good. They probably want something that just generally identifies what it is, not tries to explain all about how it works.

If you post in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Bitcoin please don’t say “yeah, but bitcoin is really important and special so the rules shouldn’t apply” or arguethat the rule is dumb or unfair. That only makes it worse. Try to address how the rule is satisfied.

Search “bitcoin” on google and see if you can find more big references in addition to the infoworld and slashdot ones. There may be very recent stuff being written by reporters who heard about it from the slashdot article.

I hope it doesn’t get deleted. If it does, it’ll be hard to overcome the presumption. Institutional momentum is to stick with the last decision. (edit: or at least I assume so, that’s how the world usually works, but maybe Wiki is different)

And later, on July 31st, the article was officially deleted, and then later restored.

Re: BitCoin Wikipedia page DELETED!!!

Posted by em3rgentOrdr, July 31, 2010, 02:17:41 AM

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin

“This page has been deleted. The deletion and move log for the page are provided below for reference.

10:42, 30 July 2010 Polargeo (talk | contribs) deleted“Bitcoin” (Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bitcoin)”

Re: BitCoin Wikipedia page DELETED!!!

Posted by sirius, September 30, 2010, 04:45:26 PM

Can we just make different language versions of a deleted page without getting them removed? Let’s do it if we can. Ican write a version in Finnish.

Re: BitCoin Wikipedia page DELETED!!!

Posted by satoshi, September 30, 2010, 05:50:32 PM

If you do, I think it should be a very brief, single paragraph article like 100 words or less that simply identifies what Bitcoin is.

I wish rather than deleting the article, they put a length restriction. If something is not famous enough, there could at least be a stub article identifying what it is. I often come across annoying red links of things that Wiki ought to at least have heard of.

The article could be as simple as something like:

“Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer decentralised /link/electronic currency/link/.”

The more standard Wiki thing to do is that we should have aparagraph in one of the more general categories that we are an instance of, like Electronic Currency or Electronic Cash. We can probably establish a paragraph there. Again, keep it short. Just identifying what it is.

Re: BitCoin Wikipedia page DELETED!!!

Posted by ribuck, December 13, 2010, 11:23:41 AM

It looks like the article will be restored. But one point that keeps being raised is that many of the article’s references are to pages in this forum. If anyone can replace a forum reference with a reference to a page that has no perceived conflict of interest, that would help.