Saturday, August 29, 2009

Help me with Steve Kaufmann's Wikipedia page!!

After hearing about Steve's run-in with a little Napolean over on Wikipedia, I thought I'd insert myself into all this fun, so I started a Wikipedia page on Steve himself. I've gone on there a few times before to check out Steve's bio, only to find myself surprised that no one had put anything up yet.

The same is actually true of LingQ as well. I do think that if Livemocha and Lang-8 get Wikipedia pages, then there's no reason why LingQ shouldn't have one. However, let's let that one cool off for a little bit and focus on Steve's entry for now.

Here's how I started it:
Steve Kaufmann is a Canadian polyglot linguist, author, award-winning blogger and the founder of the language-learning website LingQ. He currently speaks twelve languages to varying degrees of fluency: Cantonese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish.
I modeled the text after Michel Thomas' Wikipedia entry. I made lots of citations, but as the article's not so long, I marked it as a stub in the hope that you guys would step in and expand it.

To keep this from getting deleted, remember to cite! cite! cite! Steve's book is up on the web completely for free, and it's full of good, citable information (Wikipedia loves citations to books). And feel free to dig up any information that might be floating around the internets, especially on official sounding stuff (wasn't there an NPR interview a while back?).

Also, Steve, you're not allowed to edit your own entry, so please don't! But if you've got links to media coverage, that'd be helpful. And, of course, if "anonymous" comes along and edits the entry, hey, who's the wiser?

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8 Comments:

Anonymous Jeff Lindqvist said...

Swedish translation now:
http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Kaufmann

Aug 29, 2009 10:05:00 AM  
Blogger Vincent said...

Thanks, Jeff! The bureaucrats have already rose up against it, but let's see what we can do to persuade them otherwise.

Aug 29, 2009 1:15:00 PM  
Anonymous Jeff said...

Yes, same with the Swedish article now ("It seems like a commercial for the guy's website" blablabla...)

Aug 30, 2009 1:16:00 AM  
Anonymous Jeff said...

Yes, same with the Swedish article now ("It seems like a commercial for the guy's website" blablabla...)

Aug 30, 2009 1:17:00 AM  
Blogger Steve Kaufmann said...

Thanks for all the effort guys. Contrary to all the flack I received on my blog, the issue is not one of self-promotion. The issue is purely what they commissars consider "notable". I think that this is discriminatory and elitist and I will return to the subject on my blog. Thanks again.

Aug 31, 2009 3:34:00 AM  
Blogger Vincent said...

I just updated the Wikipedia page, with further media links, criticism, and a bunch of other stuff. I'd say the links I added make it cross the "notability" threshhold, but we'll see what the commissars say.

Sep 1, 2009 2:20:00 AM  
Blogger Vincent said...

I ultimately lost the battle for this page, although the moderators said it was close. They told me to sandbox the page and bring it out later when there are a few more media links, so let's hope Steve can get a little more coverage so that the page'll cross the threshhold.

Oct 6, 2009 7:20:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

>The issue is purely what they commissars consider "notable".

So, why do you consider yourself notable?

Oct 8, 2009 10:39:00 AM  

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