Kelly Martin recently blogs: "Anybody who follows Web 2.0 buzz has heard of Pownce. ...Pownce is "hot" at the moment. The fact that it comes from digg.com's Kevin Rose adds to that. And even BusinessWeek thinks this is worth writing about."

"But not Wikipedia. Wikipedia has, in fact, declared Pownce permanently nonnotable, unworthy of encyclopedic mention. Now, I could certainly accept a "wait and see" attitude regarding the article, or perhaps a very short stub, but Wikipedians have become so paranoid about Wikipedia being used as "advertisement" for other websites that they very aggressively purge anything about another web property if there's even the suggestion that the site might gain traffic from being mentioned on Wikipedia. Basically, any web property less prominent than Wikipedia itself may not have an article on Wikipedia under the current mindset."  Pownce

My comments: What did Jimmy Wales say? Something about the free flow of information. So if Pownce does not have an article on Wikipedia (WP), what happens? People go around Wikipedia and get their information elsewhere, leaving WP off in some corner, in this specific case. OK. That's what we want, right? We want to give up some of WP's search results dominance in exchange for maybe maintaining credibility? It would be nice if people valued WP highly. Maybe the answer is somewhere between the pure free flow of information and WP's credibility. I think Pownce should have an article on WP, with some sort of qualification. Perhaps with a type of infobox warning users that it is new website, hoping for traffic, or that the article is on notable probation, and may be deleted in the near future.

 

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