Could folks please help me get DigitalOcean onto wikipedia? (deleted thrice) | Hacker News Reader

Could folks please help me get DigitalOcean onto wikipedia? (deleted thrice)

en.wikipedia.org

38 pointsniels_olson41 comments

Does DO actually need and warrant an encyclopedia entry? The Netcraft article about them says they had 7,000 hosts -- versus 165K at Amazon and several million at BlueHost at the time, the other companies mentioned as points of comparison.

DO is well-known on HN, but I don't know anyone else who's heard of it. The deletion reason was "A7: No explanation of significance", which requires "a credible claim of significance or importance" to have a page on wikipedia. Merely being popular among entrepreneurs, or having some number of customers, doesn't make a company significant in the encyclopedic sense.

It was deleted again for "G11: Unambiguous advertising or promotion", and the five sentence article about their "fast, low cost options" does in fact read like an ad. It wasn't fact-checked, either, since DO is not larger than Amazon nor does it operate its own data centers.

> they have 7,000 hosts

ah, no, that's a growth rate of 7,000 a month.

That was the total number of hosts they had in June when Netcraft wrote that "meteoric rise of DO" article, which is what I assumed the talk page was referring to as a citation. Proving notability for Wikipedia generally means linking to news articles like this.

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/06/13/the-meteoric-ri...

They have grown quite a bit since then, but still nowhere near the millions of customers large hosting companies have.

But the article I cited was pretty much numbers

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/12/11/digitalocean-no...

> DO is well-known on HN, but I don't know anyone else who's ever heard of it.

IMHO that's a pretty good reason to give them an article. I've heard the name, but I don't know what they do or what's their specialty. If I wanted to get information on them I would be looking on Wikipedia (besides their website, but companies' websites are often full of marketing speak so I usually go to a third party).

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a company index.

What does the deleted article contain that is more informative about DO as a company than DO's above-the-fold?

https://www.digitalocean.com/

I think DO has far more than 7,000 hosts? Here it says almost 64,000 hosts: http://trends.netcraft.com/www.digitalocean.com, ranking 9th place for active hosts.

I'm willing to make a bet that you'll come back to your question ("Does DO actually need and warrant an encyclopedia entry?") in a few years and get a good laugh.

Meanwhile, this article has no problem surviving on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osh-Avia

Notable in the future does not imply notable right now.

But that article actually followed the most obvious rules of an article creation...

Here is the last version of the article:

DigitalOcean is a [[virtual private server]] provider based in Manhattan. They provide fast, low cost options attractive to entrepreneurial, experimental, and hobbyist developers. Their focus has raised them to prominence, having recently surpassed [[Amazon AWS]] in the number of web-facing computers, according to Netcraft <ref>http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/12/11/digitalocean-no.... The company operates datacenters in [[New York]], [[Amsterdam]], [[San Francisco]], and [[Singapore]].

They recently closed a funding round with $37.2 million from Andreessen Horowitz.<ref>Alden W, Andreessen Horowitz Backs DigitalOcean, a Cloud Computing Start-Up. 6 March 2014. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/03/06/andreessen-horowitz-b...

== References ==

Now that is not very interesting. "Growing faster than Amazon" could become interesting if it is sustained, hut as pointed out elsewhere they are tiny. Wikipedia is not a cloud server hosting comparison site, there are plenty of those that can be much more useful. They have not produced any interesting software or anything else innovative, and their only point of note is being cheap and advertising a lot on twitter. There are vast numbers of cloud provision companies, and this article has not convinced me that right now this one is sufficiently interesting that anything else other than what is written above could ever be written, unless something else happens. Certainly the VCs no doubt hope they will become more interesting over time.

And if you have any better thoughts, I absolutely invite you to contribute them from exactly where you found those words.

I found them from the article's history - I can see dead articles history as an admin.

I think you need to get the article to be on the same level as, eg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oculus_VR. What you have now in the sandbox is a stub at best, and a pretty bad stub. Web-facing servers is not important enough be a quarter of the information you're including.

It looks like there have been already quite a few discussions among Wikipedia editors about this article (it's quite interesting to follow the comments chronologically).

The main criticism I see is that the suggested article sounded like advertisement with links that only serve PR.

How can you see that?

As far as I can tell Wikipedia simply isn't interested in articles about for-profit companies unless they're multi-billion-dollar and completely impossible to ignore.

Annoying isn't it? Looks like PG problem #23 way back from July 2008 - http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html - is still an opportunity.

Agreed. The right site organization, so that significance floats naturally to the surface, is what's needed.

I don't know why it was deleted but, most likely, the article didn't meet the required standards. A good article about DO should have no problem staying up (if notable enough).

I wrote exactly what I went there wanting to know about DO. If you think you could contribute better words, please help the sandboxed version

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Niels_Olson/DigitalOcean

By standards I also mean the notability standard. Being a business that's doing well is not enough.

SSD in the cloud, Linode is just now trying to catch up. I would not expect a wikipedia editor to understand how RPMs of spinning platters in the cloud is not novel. Personally, I'm not a fan of DO but they did push SSD in the cloud while MSFT Azure is still justifying (and recently lowering their price for)their 5400RPM drives.

I don't expect an encyclopedia to include everything that ever existed, but the mere facts that people from across the world are googling Digital Ocean and discussing DO on more than just HN should necessitate an ENTRY into a free online encyclopedia. Why capture the history of a company when we can just edit/delete it? There are more important revisions going on.

Cynically but realistically, who is getting paid (or getting donations) to keep DO down?

Is the purpose of Wikipedia to educate and inform or retardedly (not my word) not have facts of the existence of a company that is a competitor to their fund contributors? DO is just a flash in the pan, like the DODO bird, but people still want to know what a dodo bird was.

Is there any way to see the deleted article you created? I had this problem before and created a new one following Wikipedia's editors advice and it got accepted. Maybe the article wasn't that good or maybe it just doesn't make sense to have an entry on Wikipedia about Digital Ocean for now.

I posted it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7610483 - I didnt look at the earlier ones, can do if you like. You have to be an admin to see deleted content.

Thanks! I'd say creating something similar to the article about Linode has a much better change of being accepted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linode

Thats better, certainly. Something about that length is always about right to start an article. People make the mistake of starting with something too short.

One could argue that DO has participated significantly in, if not triggering, the recent cost cutting in the cloud hosting industry. That seems fairly notable.

If you can find a reliable source stating that, the anti-deletion argument would be much stronger (from a Wikipedian's POV) than just saying "one could argue".

So, I'm not against deletionism, but it's a pain in the butt when I spend the better part of an hour writing and citing only to see it deleted by someone who probably knows nothing about it and were only justified by speedy deletion criteria. I would like to charge the deletionist with the responsible for A) preserving the material that was written, and B) my time (I figure $150/hr is about right).

Alternatively, if you would like to help buff up the article before it goes live again, I sandboxed it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Niels_Olson/DigitalOcean

> Their focus has raised them to prominence, having recently surpassed Amazon AWS in the number of web-facing computers, according to Netcraft

You misread that article. They had a larger single-month gain than AWS in web-facing computers. They are not larger than Amazon.

> The company operates datacenters in New York, Amsterdam, San Francisco, and Singapore.

They do not operate any data centers. They have servers in other companies' data centers in those locations.

The rest of the article is written like an ad. It's missing any claim of significance -- what makes DO different from the other hundreds of small VPS providers? Wikipedia isn't a company directory, significance is a requirement for having its own page.

Very true. It's quite a difference if you talk about absolute numbers or about rates of growth.

$150/hr, five sentences. $7?

5 sentences + dealing with bureaucracy. Pretty sure a lawyer would charge all of it.

I have to agree with the deleter that called it "G11: Unambiguous advertising or promotion".

Suggestion: Cut out all the adjectives and stick to a 'just the facts' style. Find an article that isn't about DO's finances but instead just lists it aside other major cloud/VPS providers.

Reads like a poorly written CV.

That took you an hour?

I cleaned it up as best as I could:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Niels_Olson/...

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