Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/History of the Internet

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[edit] History of the Internet

Self-nomination, peer-review taken, good article nominated. This is a well rounded overview of the Internet's history, from early concepts to modern use. Following the resolution of a content dispute, the article was substantialy rewriten to address readability and content issues. The article has been expanded and globalized, and remained functionaly stable since the rewrite. Images on the page are suitably licenced. Uses inline citation and is fully referenced. --Barberio 07:12, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

• Object. No historiography section in an article purporting to be a history. 2 b comprehensiveness. Fifelfoo 09:09, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
  • There is no current concensus on requiring Historiography [1] nor is this a consistant part of past featured articles on history. --Barberio 00:21, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
    • The discussion is actually taking place here: Wikipedia_talk:What_is_a_featured_article#Additional_requirement_for_articles_dealing_with_a_historical_subject_to_be_featured. AndyZ 22:38, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
• Object. Many instances of Using Titlecase for Sub-Headings: WP:MOSHEAD says rather to "Capitalise the first letter of the first word and any proper nouns in headings, but leave the rest lower case." Petty, but fixable. Telsa 12:18, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
  • This has been Fixed. --Barberio 00:17, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
    • So it has. Okay, withdrawn. Shall go and read content now :) --Telsa 09:20, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

• Object. Lead intro too short for the article length. The longer the article, the longer the intro should be. Fieari 15:22, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
  • This has been Fixed. --Barberio 00:34, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
  • Two more objections. The first is that the first couple of headings are a little bit stumpy looking, each consisting of only one paragraph. Either merge those sections together, or add more information, or something to that effect. It just doesn't look right.

The second is that it doesn't seem comprehensive. While the copyright enforcement issue isn't nessisarily an important enough part of the history of the internet to get a detailed look in this article, other aspects of p2p are important, such as how they influenced network traffic. There was a time when ONLY download speed was important, so ISPs, even high-speed ones, would cap upload speeds, thinking no one would notice. p2p comes along, and suddenly upload is as important to customers as download. That sort of thing. It seems that the whole history cuts off after the dot-com bubble burst as well... the internet is a new enough thing that ignoring 2000-present is a hefty portion, and the title of the article doesn't specifically limit to scope. I think more needs to be covered.

I have an additional comment that isn't grounds for objection, but might be nice to look into anyway. The article is a little sparse on images. Now, it's not required that FAs have lots of images, but I think a couple more could be used, just to make things look nicer. Fieari 00:27, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

• • • It is still to be demonstrated if p2p file sharing will be a fundamental and highly significant use on a par with the WWW and E-mail. POV issues would be raised to start adding this now, when the implications and eventual outcome remain unsetled. --Barberio 04:56, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
• Object. The article talks about some applications (WWW, e-mail, Usenet) but neglects to mention some other very popular ones. I can immediately think of: Instant Messaging, file sharing/P2P (particularly Napster [historical], eDonkey, BitTorrent), VoIP, and IRC. The application side is probably the hardest to get right, and I like the structure of the "Use and culture" section as a skeleton, but we've still got quite a long way to go to Featured Article status, I would say. The words "censorship" and "copyright" do not appear in the article once; issues like pornography, child pornography, encryption, copyright enforcement etc. have had historical repercussions; these should be summarized. While I'm all in favor of concise overview articles, I think for an extremely complex topic like this one, it could be a little longer.--Eloquence* 05:52, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
  • While the word 'Censorship' is not mentioned, Censorship itself is mentioned Under Digital Divide in relation to China. Widespread use of 'Chat' like applications pre-dates the Internet, and was mentioned as such under the 'public access' section.
  • While issues like pornography, child pornography, encryption, copyright enforcement etc. are notable, they are not issues of the Internet, but much wider scope issues that have some connection with the Internet. We do not have the unlimited space to address all issues that have some connection to the Internet. For instance, 'The dot-com crash' is directly linked with the Internet, while Copyright enforcement is an issue that has some assoiations with the Internet. --Barberio 06:57, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

• Comment: the TOC looks rather large, and should probably be made into a better hierarchal structure. AndyZ 22:10, 1 February 2006 (UTC)