User talk:Bill Clark

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[edit] Sorry to hear of your troubles

So sorry you had a nasty run in with the deletionistas. Please don't be discouraged, and stay and hold your ground. Don't let a bad experience color your view of the whole project. Please be patient, and let the process work--remember "Rome was not built in a day". Check in on the AfD discussion on your contributions. The consensus is trending toward keep. Your body of work could be used to revise the standards used to establish notability, which are in serious need of reevaluation to keep up with the explosive growth of Wikipedia. Dhaluza 01:17, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Bill, ditto the above! Our process works when people follow procedures. Someone didn't in the case of the deletion nominations. We are working on a fix. --Kevin Murray 23:59, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

  • Bill, I concur with the other two editors. I challenged the content on some of your articles, but sometimes a healthy debate enables the community to work together in the search for consensus. I have always been impressed with your articulate and patient communication throughout the debate process. It would be a great loss to Wikipedia to lose you. Alan.ca 07:37, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Lists of utilities

Bill, I'm sorry I've not gotten involved earlier in your disputes. I'm very involved with WikiProject Spam and saw the reference to your cable TV-related edits but I did not interject because I was busy. I'm very interested in infrastructure-related issues and I see both sides of the issue.

I'm inclined to think that adding a utilities section to the inline text of articles for towns is inappropriate. We're not really a directory for relocation information. A separate section within the article body for that material just adds to article's clutter.

That leads to the idea of adding links at the end of the article, but that's an even poorer idea. If we get more than about 5 external links (not footnotes) at the end of an article, my experience has shown that the article quickly becomes a spam magnet: see the essay, "Spam Event Horizon". If the gas, power, cable, telephone and water utilities all get links, then you have 5 right there. In bigger towns, the CLECs are going to want their links, too.

Most provinces or states have WikiProjects to cover topics within their areas. Some of them have developed little information boxes for each town encapsulating basic information (population, founding date, etc.) I think utilities could be added unobtrusively to these templates but this should only be done with the consensus of the WikiProject members for that particular area. I wouldn't push it now, given the current stink over so-called cable "spam".

The preferred approach instead is to add a link for the town to Open Directory Project, better known as "Dmoz.org" or just "Dmoz". This not just allowed but specifically encouraged by our External Links Guideline. "Wikipedia is not a repository of links" but DMOZ is and the two are very complimentary sources of information. It really helps our external links problem since now we just tell folks to take it to DMOZ and link back here from the DMOZ page for Podunk or vehicle insurance or whatever.

So for example, instead of adding a link to the cable company in Highlands, NC, add a link to DMOZ for everything in the town:

Highlands doesn't have any DMOZ entries for its utilities but it should. If you wanted a cable TV link, you could:

  1. Submit suggestions to DMOZ for inclusion
  2. Become a DMOZ editor yourself:
  3. Perhaps work out something informal with DMOZ for the interested Wikipedia and DMOZ editors to share some efforts with them for the lists I suggest below. (I say "informal" because we're so anarchic here that it would take forever to herd all the cats to get formal approval and we wouldn't need it anyway).

Before I get to the lists, however, I should add that I'm not involved with DMOZ and I don't know much about how they operate. Maybe this isn't realistic.

What I think would be very helpful on Wikipedia are lists by state of utilities along the lines of "List of cable TV companies in Ohio", "List of power utilities in Bavaria", organized by county or district and listing the multiple utilities in each county. Some provincial and state regulatory commissions publish maps of service areas; if public domain copies were available, they would be invaluable to these readers.

The people who really want to know about the cable TV operator in Highlands, North Carolina are people in the infrastructure business and they would probably prefer to have it on a by-state basis anyway. They'd also probably love maps and Wikipedia has some people who love to generate maps.

I think Wikipedia's coverage of utilities is poor and needs to be better. Georgia Power is a multi-billion dollar operation yet its current article, still just a stub, was only started 5 months ago. There are thousands of readers in the U.S. who could use this information. The same is true of utilities elsewhere around the world. I also think that any utility with >$10 million in revenues is notable and should have an article someday.

The demographics of Wikipedia's readers are much broader than those of the active Wikipedia editors which are still broader than those of our 1000 or so admins. That's not a criticism of Wikipedia's hard-working volunteers -- if anything, it's a call instead to get cable TV folks and others off their butts to help out here, too. Those thousands who could use the cable TV lists aren't editing here -- just reading. At least the cable TV world has one person (you) -- that's one more than some other industries have.

It would also be helpful to have a ranking list for each country of the largest utilities ranked by size. So for the U.S. or Canada, you could have rankings like this:

  1. MSOs ranked by number of customers and/or
  2. MSOs ranked by cable system revenues (to exclude other activities such as publishing).

I'd be happy to support you if you're interested, although I could not invest large amounts of time.

I also understand that Rome wasn't built in a day. Just in North America there are 50 states in the U.S. and 13 provinces or territories in Canada. Worldwide there are 190+ countries. Still, like all things on Wikipedia, this could start out small and incrementally grow over time, hopefully drawing in some help from others.

I have a reputation with some here as a hardliner on spam and link issues so I think I could perhaps bring some credibility to the initiative should questions be raised about spam. Feel free to contact me using the Wikipedia "E-mail this user" feature: Special:Emailuser/A. B., on my talk page or by e-mailing me at texasguy596 at yahoo dot com.

Thanks for all your work to date on Wikipedia. --A. B. (talk) 16:23, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Yikes! After spending a lot of time on the above proposal, now I see you're gone. If you ever come back, either as an anon or as Bill Clark or as some other user name, feel free to get in touch with me. --A. B. (talk) 16:29, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
I've left notes in several places about this proposal. Since Bill is gone, perhaps it would be best to leave any comments about it on my talk page, not his, at User talk:A. B.#Lists of utilities. --A. B. (talk) 17:07, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
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