Richard BF

Wikipedia works. By all rights it shouldn’t, but it does. There’s been a lot of analysis of Wikipedia in the blogosphere, so I’m not going to go into here. But I do want to talk about some of the problems we face as self appointed Wikipedia editors.

Vlogging, or videoblogging, is fairly new in its purest form, blog posts recorded as video. Now because vlogging is a new form of blogging, vloggers are looking to the lessons of blogging, as the direction they’re headed as well.

In blogging, whether you like it or not, traffic is pretty much everything, and those who say otherwise are probably either lying, or fooling themselves. Why blog in a public space, if you don’t care about traffic? It would be much easier to pop into Word or Notepad and write notes to yourself, than posting to a blog. Videobloggers know that traffic now, is the key to being on the A list when videoblogging breaks into the mainstream.

So what happens when an entry for vlogging appears on Wikipedia, and there’s a section for examples? Well, in the early days, all the known videobloggers were listed, all 12 of them. But now there’s several hundred, so where do you draw the line? Every few days someone goes in to the examples section and adds themselves to the list. It’s all about traffic and prestige.

I’ve been maintaining the list of examples for the last few months, and I’ve been applying the following rules to each added example:

1. Does it match the actual vlog definition?
2. Does it offer anything innovative or new, that the current examples don’t have?
3. Is it well known on the Yahoo! Groups Videoblogging list, the defacto home of videoblogging?
4. Have they been videoblogging for a while, or are they new?

But this doesn’t change the fact that every few days, without fail, someone goes in and adds their vlog as an example. It’s all about traffic and prestige.

So let’s do what vloggers are doing, and look at blogging for an example. The Wikipedia entry for Weblog handles examples by not actually having any. This is only a recent change, because only a month ago, there were about 30 examples. I guess they feel they’re at a point where people know what a blog is, so they don’t need to give an example.

Ultimately, this is what needs to happen with the Vlog entry, but is now the right time? Can we now get away without any examples? I think so, before there’s several hundred examples in Wikipedia, which are all mostly identical.

Remember, it’s all about traffic and prestige.