Symphony.

Today I managed to spare a good few hours to update the very much neglected Symphony wikipedia.

Coincidentally, during the major rewrite, one of the Wikipedia contributors marked the entry for deletion due to 3 months of inactivity despite asking the authors to conform to the wikipedia notary standards.

I have since made 10 references to the page, updating all of the article's content but I need contributors to help flesh out the article and fix up any grammatical/spelling mistakes.

It's probably going to be deleted, keep a copy of it somewhere. When they start ranting about notability you're basically fucked.

A site I visit every so often (oldunreal.com) has been around for years, it has special resources for the original Unreal game, but since the community is so small, and not press worthy, it's entry got deleted. It doesn't really matter that it's been around for 8 years.

Do these count as references?

http://godbit.com/article/interview-stephen-bau http://thebignoob.com/

We need a Symphony book ;-)

I find wikipedia's policies puzzling, to say the least. Why Symphony is not 'notable', but (as an example) the dead forum software Vikingboard IS doesn't make a lot of sense to me. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikingboard, http://vikingboard.com/).

In any case, what needs to be done to make an article 'notable'?

In any case, what needs to be done to make an article 'notable'?

Notability requires (preferably multiple) sources that can verify a fact, which don't exist for most of the information Allen supplied. Wikipedia also doesn't allow 1st-parties supplying information on a topic. I don't think this is too much of a problem since this kind of info should go on the Symphony website or forum anyway, not Wikipedia. There seem to be many misconceptions about Symphony, which can only be our fault for not providing enough info on the homepage.

Cena, you might be interested in reading anything by Jason Scott on Wikipedia's puzzling nature, or listening to some of his speeches on archive.org.

It's deleted. Someone put it back up, quick!.

You can find a copy of the entry here: http://www.wikigrain.org/?req=Symphony+CMS&sort=rel

Not sure what is gained by deleting that page. I really detest wikipedia.

Alistair: Now there is more room in the intertubes for Lost episode synopses! These are of far greater importance imho...

omg yes! Season 5 ....... not long now .....

@Alistair - Wikipedia is a high tech version of "Whoever shouts the loudest, wins". I don't trust the content there at all.

Ok, but seriously, what needs to happen to get this back up? As I understand it, we need

• user (not developer)-written and submitted content
• 3 or 4 outside sources that describe it to make it 'notable'.

I say we get an XSL bigwig to give Symphony a shout-out. Like Jenni Tennison or the like. Do you think Wikipedia would care about that? I run 80-90% of my client's sites on Symphony. It's pretty &*$@ notable to me. Other thoughts?

Majority of online distributed software (not published as hardcopies on store shelves) on wikipedia do not adhere to their notability guidelines. From what I heard from Wikipedia contributors, the likes of Textpattern, Expression Engine and Radiant do not pass the notability test. Whether or not they will do anything about it depends on them...Symphony just happens to be on their keen list of ban hammer.

Part of the phenomenon might be: If you got Symphony, you will spend your time building cool Websites instead of writing about it. So we hardly find "valuable" sources. Instead we find hundreds, maybe thousands of great websites built with the smartest and most inspiring system all around. Nothing of interest for Wikipedia...

Who cares? Does the team care about being "famous"? I don't think so. Nor do Symphonians, I think. I can live well with being a "strange" guy using a "strange" system, as long as people ask me: "How the hell did you do that? It's so simple to use, and it works perfectly!" This means more to me than any Wikipedia entry.

I like Wikipedia, and I am very sure it has an important impact on our culture. I often use it! But I do not care at all if I find an entry about Symphony there.

All,

We need your help keeping Symphony on Wikipedia. As Allen has noted above, the editors there seem to have an itchy trigger finger when it comes to deleting the entry, despite the presence of entries for many less-referenced and less-notable CMSes.

After having been deleted in January, a few weeks ago we rewrote the entry and reposted it, including many new references aimed at establishing the system’s notability (one of the primary reason’s for its deletion). It was deleted immediately without any discussion at all. So we re-posted it again. Now it is again marked for deletion.

If you can come up with any references that bolster the article’s “notability,” please update the entry to include them. If you’d like to contribute to the discussion over its pending deletion, please do so on the deletion discussion page.

I think having new contributions from a variety of people around the world can only help. As for the discussion, let’s not be angry or argumentative, but simply express (and back-up with references and sound arguments) our belief that Symphony is notable enough to be included in Wikipedia.

just make sure there’s a back up of the wiki source code then repost it if it does happen to get deleted again ;)

I find this whole thing quite stupid on Wikipedia’s part.

From their guidelines:

The notability guidelines determine whether a topic is notable enough to be a separate article in Wikipedia. They do not give guidance on the content of articles, except for lists of people.[7] Instead, various content policies govern article content, with the amount of coverage given to topics within articles decided by its appropriate weight.

A lack of notability does not necessarily mean that reliably sourced information should be removed from Wikipedia. Consider merging such content to a more appropriate article.

In our case, what is a ‘more appropriate’ article?

Notability is not temporary: a topic needs to have had sufficient coverage in reliable sources to meet the general notability guideline, but it does not need to have ongoing coverage from news sources.

From our references, we have 5 different reliable sources reporting on Symphony over the last 2 years, including Six Revisions and a user collaborated ‘best of’ list.

Maybe we should send something to the editors of these articles asking for a hand?

From another angle, we should push Symphony as being almost the only CMS to utilize the XML/XSL stack?

I do see where they are coming from. There is very little in the way of notoriety of Symphony outside of its tiny bubble.

Not sure if any of these links could be used:

• http://www.a2hosting.com/cms/symphony-cms-hosting
• http://www.firephp.org/Wiki/Libraries/Symphony-CMS
• http://www.cmsdesignresource.com/cms-list/symphony/
• http://www.blogperfume.com/cms-symphony-xml-and-xslt-web-publishing-system/

Unfortunately software such as RoR has got so much press in the offline world as well (DHH on the cover of Business Week etc) that this counts as notability. The sources need to be independent of Symphony, Airlock, and any of the developers or users. I think we should be looking outside of our sphere of blogs and clients. Things such as:

• independent reviews or comparisons
• mentions in press such as magazines
• use by “A-listers” perhaps, or dedicated conference sessions

I wonder how notoriety differs in other forms of medium. For example, Airlock’s wiki page. Does the fact that it’s a registered business somehow make it more factual? If that’s the case, would a trademark patent or a business name register make a difference in this case?

I don’t want to beat a dead horse and I understand the argument of “citing precedence does not automatically validate your argument” but I want to know how the rules might be different for Textpattern’s or Radiant CMS’s versus ours. In the latter case, Radiant CMS is a younger system with fewer notoriety and had not been marked for deletion even when the citation issue had been raised.

If anything I just want to know what they are doing right so we can follow their format.

Yes, every single Textpattern reference is for a pretty closely tied community project, or sub sites of the project itself. That isn’t better in any way than the references on the Symphony page.

Why do they discount this Airlock reference? The news source is independent to Airlock, it is only reporting on the actions of Airlock.