(to be precise, blog authors think a lot of themselves and want to spam their links everywhere)

My experience was made worse by the fact that I was writing about Canadian information, and Canadian information that was related to blogs.

To take blogs first. Wikipedia has a strange bias against blogs. Its absolutely bizarre, and editors seem to take pride in deleting blog-related entries. I thought Wikipedia’s great strength was supposed to be its populist currency. But it seems to have its own form of elitism — a form of “cyber-hierarchy,” of which blog information falls below the threshold for inclusion.

Lastly, the English Wikipedia is dominated numbers-wise by American editors. While this is fine for most entries, it causes a problem when non-American entries are deleted for not being “notable” according to American standards. Needless to say, what constitutes notability in the U.S. — especially when it is based on sheer numbers (most countries have smaller populations than the U.S.) — can not be reasonably applied to information from other countries. Yet this is what the editors cited when they deleted Canadian entries. (The German, Italian etc. Wikipedias seem to be insulated by their unique languages, and I assume it is only non-American anglophones who encounter this problem).

In the end, Wikipedia provided a good general exposure to how Wikis work. At the moment, I’m putting together a project called the Canadian Encyclopedia of the Internet that will give this information a permanent home (http://www.simonpole.ca/node/359). To avoid Wikipedia’s problems, it looks like editors will be drawn from among party-affiliated Canadian political blogging groups (numbering over 400 bloggers). I am hoping the public group affiliation of individual editors will moderate edit wars, libel etc. by peer pressure.

Anyways, there’s more at the above link if you’re at all interested. Thanks again for the essays.