I remember a while back listening to the Digital Campus podcast and there was a mention of how Wikipedia moderators have been cracking down on uncited articles.

While searching for my name on cuil.com, I found a few copies on the MacAst article that I had contributed to.


**flashback**
Before MP3 playing software was given away with the Operating System (or as Freeware on the internet), you actually had to buy the software (circa 1998). I had purchased a program called MacAmp which was later renamed MacAst.

The program was nice, working under MacOS 9, it had a small footprint and the nice thing about it was that it had an extensible architecture which allowed people to create localization files called Phrasebooks. I had created and submitted those phrasebooks to the MacAst people for Greek, Italian and French (available in the download section and through archive.org).

Years later, when I stumbled upon the wikipedia entry for MacAst, I added some information about it, namely about it's extensible Phrasebook architecture, I mentioned the localizations that were available, and gave myself credit for the three that I had done.


**flash forward**

I clicked on the wikipedia link to go to the main article for MacAst and the article was not there!!! What had happened?

Well, There were two articles, one on MacAst (which seemed to me pretty balanced, despite the lack of references), and one for MacAmp (which the wiki people thought was one sided).

The wikipedia people merged the two articles and kept the one sided one, and edited the heck out of it. Now, I can go ahead, and cite archive.org and a few news released from various mac websites of the time to give the article a bit more meat on its bones, but this lead me down a thinking path: What happens when you don't have citations? How do you cite that?

There is another wikipedia entry that I contribute to, the entry for the village I grew up in Greece. Most of the knowledge I have of that place is either first hand - I grew up there, I roamed about, I know of the places, or second or third hand - my grandmother, or neighbor told me a history of the village, or told me of a story that has been passed down in the oral tradition from one generation to the other.

In these instances what do you do? Do you record these things on your blog or website before you contribute to the wiki entry or what? It dawned on me that what wikipedia is trying to leverage is the knowledge that is within all of us, and some of that knowledge is tacit. You know it's true, you just don't remember what the source was, or there is no written record, or you can't admit to knowing about it because you got just happened to find a 'beta' of an unreleased piece of software that never made it to market that you weren't supposed to have anyway...

Going heavy handed with the editing seems to be a detracting feature of current day wikipedia...

Just my two cents...