The dictators of Wikipedia. One of them is a cat…

Since some weeks now I am working at the StudentCar office and I decided to put a StudentCar article on Wikipedia. Of course this encyclopedia should have an article about this initiative for  students. I found that Wikipedia already has a page called “autodelen”(car-sharing), which explains the concept and history of car-sharing, and shows the picture of a car of our friends from Greenwheels. The page also lists some companies which are said to be carsharing organizations (some aren’t even, but who am I to judge).  What is weird however: The great company StudentCar was missing. WTF! How could they forget us! 

Fortunately, the great concept of wikipedia allows everybody to adjust and add content so I quickly added StudentCar to the list. To make it complete, I added the new page StudentCar, and linked the two.
Nice that was easy…. Within minutes however, the page was REMOVED. (WTF! no. 2), and I received a message that the content of my article was considered an advertisement. The name of StudentCar in the list of carsharing companies was also removed! Of course I was aware that advertising on WP is not allowed, and therefore the text was really informative mainly explaining the general concept, some history and some developments in transportation behavior our company notices. 

Somehow, this was still not good enough for……for who actually? Who decides what is good content and what’s not? The users of course! And I think that’s a good concept. However, some people (the so called wiki volunteers) however take their hobby a bit too serious and turn it into a full time (non-paid) job correcting people.

In our case with hardly valid arguments, listen to this; The StudentCar article was removed by somebody calling him/herself “Kattenkruid” which means something like “catherb”. Kattenkruid considered the text as an advertisement and there was a copyright issue, with an article about the introduction of the first electric car in Rotterdam on the website of Efleetsolutions (http://www.efleetsolutions.nl/nieuws-pers.html)… That’s funny, this website is owned by StudentCar , It was StudentCar who was one of the initiators of this introduction, the car is operated by StudentCar, and I can guarantee you: nobody within the company complained about the StudentCar article on Wikipedia… 

Okay, publishing an article on Wikipedia is clearly not as easy as I expected. Check next week's blog for more Wikipedia frustrations including WTF 3 and 4