Thursday, December 29, 2011

Wikipedia wants to delete me!

I doubt my notability all the time, but despite that fact, it's also true that I've sold more than a million books and helped a lot of people learn how to create web pages and ebooks. Just last week, I got a major prize in Barcelona for my publishing work about Catalonia.

However, this evening Dori Smith let me know via Twitter that someone on Wikipedia had marked my entry for deletion due to questions about my notability.

If you think I'm notable enough to be in Wikipedia, you can add sources about my notability to my current page and/or to the AFD page.

Here's what others say:

Omnium Cultural: “The jury for the 25th Joan B. Cendrós Prize has awarded the prize for work about the Catalan nation published outside of Catalonia to the North-American publisher Liz Castro [El jurat del 25è Premi Joan B. Cendrós ha atorgat el premi per a treballs publicats o emesos fora dels Països Catalans sobre la nació catalana a l’editora nord-americana Liz Castro.] Full translation here

Self-publishing guru Joel Friedlander: “Liz Castro’s EPUB Straight to the Point is a fantastic resource with clear instruction and should be in the ereader of anyone whose work involves dealing with EPUB and iBooks.”

Communication Arts magazine: She is the author of the bestselling HTML, XHTML, and CSS, Sixth Edition: Visual QuickStart Guide which together with its earlier editions has sold more than one million copies in more than fifteen languages. She has also written books on Blogger, iPhoto, Perl and CGI, and XML. The guides are written and published for inexperienced Web designers who want to start from the beginning and contain information in bullet points and note form for easy reading.

Vook calls me an "industry expert"

TidBITS: If you're thinking about making a book in iPhoto, my fellow Peachpit author Liz Castro has created a wonderfully useful Web site where she obsessively documents each and every iPhoto book theme

Vilaweb [major Catalan news website] interviewed me in February, 2011: “Recently, Castro published EPUB Straight to the Point (Peachpit Press), a guide for writing books for digital readers like the iPad. She is also the author of the bestseller “HTML, XHTML, and CSS: Visual QuickStart Guide” of which six editions have been published and the seventh is being prepared, and more than a million copies of which have been sold. She also wrote “Creating a Web Page with HTML” and “Publishing a Blog with Blogger”, among others. [“No fa gaire va publicar 'EPUB Straight to the Point' (Peachpit Press), una guia per a escriure llibres en pissarretes digitals com l'iPad. És autora del 'best-seller' 'HTML, XHTML, and CSS: Visual QuickStart Guide', amb sis edicions (la setena, en preparació) i més d'un milió d'exemplars venuts. També ha escrit 'Creating a Web Page with HTML' i 'Publishing a Blog with Blogger', etc. ”]

Peachpit Press: Elizabeth Castro is the author of all edtions of the best-selling HTML for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide. She is also the author of Perl and CGI for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide and XML for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide--both bestsellers! Liz also founded Pågina Uno, a publishing house in Barcelona, Spain.

6 comments:

  1. Sounds kind of ridiculous that anyone would want to delete anyone on Wikipedia, except perhaps if they'd never done a thing. I mean, is there a limited amount of space on the Internet or something? Hardly. Take heart. It's not Wikipedia that wants to delete you. Just some dude with time on their hands!

    ReplyDelete
  2. For biographies of living people, it seems that Wikipedia wants multiple third-party references, such as mention in newspaper articles, third-party books, or websites. (Currently, the only reference is your website, which doesn't "count" because anyone can set up a website.)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymouse (aren't they the cutest rodents?) is right; this point relates to Wikipedia's stance on neutrality. Nonetheless, it -is- a crowd sourced and treasured project so the article is unlikely to be deleted permanently because it -does- include relevant information.

    I once had a Wikipedian insist that a misspelling of a word in my mother language can't be fixed because I didn't provide references.

    While I was initially annoyed (I speak the language, darn it) I realized that this reliance on citation can only improve the value of the information on that page. A reference to a standard dictionary supplied by another Wikipedian and the case was solved. =)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi Liz
    I added a hyperlink from the Wikipedia EPUB topic to your page. Not sure how long this will stay (since the link points out that anyone hoping to make ePubs with InDesign 5.0 will have to study your book to make those ePubs actually pass preflight).

    Also FWIW, I listed you in the acknowledgments of my VLOOKUP Awesome Quick enhanced eBook which I submitted to my distributor today. I never would have been able to get the video and audio to work without your eBook on the subject. You've undoubtedly saved countless people weeks of frustration when they tried to make their InDesign 5.0 ePubs actually work.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Dear Lisa, i am facing Problem in adding equations in epub 2. I tired SVG but svg images does not scale according to text font size and SVG text takes lot of time to enter 1 equation. can you help me...(anthony@eathenasolutions.com)

    ReplyDelete
  6. What I wrote elsewhere about the same topic is instructive:
    **************

    Wikipedia is useful for finding out information which is verifiable (and found in some commercially maintained databases). That means birth dates, death dates, colleges attended, ISBN numbers, awards, etc. It is minimally useful for acknowledging controversy about a topic. Wikipedia is semi-competent for providing overviews of laws and physical sciences. Wikipedia is now inadequate in identifying notable people, notable ideas, notable works of art. It is also inadequate in assessing value of a contributed link. It also is inadequate at handling independent media or in documenting phenomenon of no economic value.

    The need to have “notability” and “reliability” causes Wikipedia to trust known commercial media sources more than unknown ones. That is a bias which ultimately will limit Wikipedia’s usefulness and cause lesser known encylopedias to be more informative and insightful.

    ReplyDelete

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