Friday, May 18, 2007

Evolution of the Fuze Beverage article


I chose to edit the Fuze Beverage Wikipedia article because one of my friends was doing a project for food marketing at her school and she gave me the idea to edit the Fuze Beverage one. The Wikipedia article actually was redirected to this link, so it is not the same link as I had been referencing before. I had the most problems with this article and I will explain it all in the end. It started out as a very weak article with the types of beverages and the official website. I had many options of what to add and I was just going to keep going with what was already there.

For the first edit I chose to keep it simple. I saw that they had listed the flavors of Fuze Beverages, but there was one missing so I added it. It was Fuze Vitalize and I added that it contained vitamins A, C, and E. Later I found out that you are not supposed to list these, but I had no idea seeing as how that was basically all the article consisted of when I first looked at it.

The second edit is where I added some background history of the company. I included the founder, how and where it was created, and how it became successful and spread across the country. Again, I think that sharing the company's history is very important and can be helpful for someone curious about Fuze Beverage and how it came to be.

For the third edit I decided to delete the whole article. I was curious to see what would happen and how the Wikipedia community would react when they saw that this article was no longer there.

There were several edits besides mine. One edit was that they changed the slogan, did some maintenance, clean up, and made some small changes. Also, they redirected the article's url because it was better used to describe electrical fuses. Then they started saying this article was spam (saying: "Yeah, the subject matter may be legit, but the way this is written sets off my spamdar, big time.") and they said it was advertising because you are not supposed to list the flavors because then it seems like it is advertising the product. Someone even wrote this in the history, "Have you seen the state of this page? It's about as encyclopaedia-like as this comment." Pretty harsh and by the way they did not even spell encyclopedia correctly. So that is when I decided that this article is hopeless and it should just be deleted. So I erased the whole thing. Surprisingly exactly 12 minutes after I deleted it I got a message saying that I was not allowed to delete it without having a good reason. Then in the history when they undid my deleting they said it was "blanking silliness." I thought that was pretty humorous. I have no idea why they would even care if the article was there or not since it was such a bad article that they criticised for everything about it. Instead of criticising it they should have deleted the advertisement things and added more substantial information that would be appropriate for an encyclopedia to make the article better.

Since this is my last comment on Wikipedia I thought I would share my overall thoughts about it. First, the Wikipedia community seems rather weird to me. They seem very particular about what they want in the article and do not like new people and outsiders messing with the proper rules of Wikipedia. Second, I do not think this should be used as a primary reference source because of the fact that anyone can edit it. Third, I believe this only works for articles in which many people have high interests in. In this case many people will be continuously looking at the article trying to improve it and edit the errors put in. Finally, I think with more and more users everyday, Wikipedia does have the potential to be great, I just do not think it is at that point right now.

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