User talk:Smarteralec

Mountain bump

Welcome to Wikipedia and thanks for starting the "mountain bump" article. I was surprised that there wasn't one already when I looked a few days ago, but I only had time to add it to the requested articles page with a few references. I appreciate the work. -- HiEv 10:22, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

A page you started (DoubleDOS) has been reviewed!

Thanks for creating DoubleDOS, Smarteralec!

Wikipedia editor SparrowHK just reviewed your page, and wrote this note for you:

Nice work, but please add some reliable sources.

To reply, leave a comment on SparrowHK's talk page.

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Proposed deletion of DoubleDOS

The article DoubleDOS has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

subject is non notable

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, content or articles may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. Meatsgains (talk) 05:30, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

Alas, poor DoubleDOS, we knew you well, yet the years have not been kind to you....

Well, apparently the DoubleDOS page has been deleted as "non-notable". As a longish-time (and HUGE fan) Wikipedian (can I say "user"?, apparently my spell-checker doesn't like Wikipedian), this shows a weakness in the current arrangement of Wikipedia.

Encyclopedias had great value as they were written by experts, often invited to contribute articles in their field. I created the DoubleDOS page as I consider it to be a very significant piece of software in the development of online sites and communities (kinda like Wikipedia itself) during the 1980s prior to the public Net, let alone the Web. I consider myself somewhat of an expert in this field as that is exactly what I spent a good portion of the 1980s and 1990s doing, within the academic, governmental, business and professional arenas. So I created the article as a 'stub' late one evening, after reading an atrociously written and factually-incorrectly-littered article on another, similar, piece of software from roughly the same time period (approx. 1984-1989). I left a comment saying "Need to add citations later", but before I could get around to digging up some old, paper-based (ie. pre-public-access-Net days) citations to back up the article, someone happily did some online research and rewrote the article to make it congruent with the paucity of information easily available on the Web. Thus the subject was stripped of any "notability", as someone trying to write that article based solely on "original research using the Web", would have indeed determined. Thus it was marked for deletion, and (again) before I found the free time and inclination to make the necessary edits and citations it has now gone to the void of the dreaded red-ink links. Sigh.

My question to the Wikipedia community, although I am painfully aware this is not the place to voice my plaintive bleat (in fact, Wikipedia has become so large and complex - even convoluted - in its help and guidance functions, that I'm not even sure where to start looking for the preferred locale), is how to fix this? As we (society and "The Global Mind" at large), transition from artifact-based memory to the electronic form, we are in danger of losing that narrow window of history concerning Net things that were Not Written Down And Published *prior* to the advent of the Web. From half-a-dozen years ost-Web, Google keeps a magnificent repository of every thought ever typed, and their books project will slowly add all printed media to the archives.

However, what about the early Net and Web history? A few journalists have written some good histories for portions of those times (Steven Levy's "Hackers" I recall as being both well-written and well-researched, "Hard Drive" perhaps somewhat less so), but a very few people become notable enough to be interviewed by journalists, and they will only put their spin on history (viz. "Hard Drive" above). And what happens when the journalists don't know what questions to ask? As the man who made the decision to use perhaps the most infamous piece of technology ever devised (the atomic bomb) said, "The only thing new is the history you don't know". Besides, who's got time to write a book which would then become an acceptable source?

Oh well, and so it goes. What odds, Archie?

Your draft article, Draft:Jennifer Stills

Hello, Smarteralec. It has been over six months since you last edited the Articles for Creation submission or Draft page you started, "Jennifer Stills".

In accordance with our policy that Wikipedia is not for the indefinite hosting of material deemed unsuitable for the encyclopedia mainspace, the draft has been deleted. If you plan on working on it further and you wish to retrieve it, you can request its undeletion by following the instructions at this link. An administrator will, in most cases, restore the submission so you can continue to work on it.

Thanks for your submission to Wikipedia, and happy editing. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 01:09, 28 December 2020 (UTC)

Users, contributors, and editors

Many of the first, many of the second, too many are only the third. Not quite what one thought for the future of human thought, when one realized in the 1980s, "there will be no editors for the internetworked net. SmarterAlec (talk) 16:06, 23 August 2021 (UTC)