Knol is Pow

Google have just set up their wikipedia rival, called Knol. Cue Zapruder jokes. Anyway, I started an Adventure Game Studio article there, so feel free to go and improve it, but just cut/pasting from the Wikipedia article is probably a bad idea.

AGS Games in Wikipedia

If you head over to Wikipedia, you'll find there's a few articles on various games made with AGS, and quite a long article about AGS itself (which was mainly written by DragonRose, I believe). Now, before you go and add your own game into Wikipedia, please beware... there used to be more articles about AGS games, but they were deleted. If you've not contributed to Wikipedia much, then you probably don't realise that they have quite strict policies about Vanity pages, Evidence for factual statements and most of all, Notability. Now, all of these are quite subjective and there are probably many pages in Wikipedia that would fall foul of these guidelines if anyone got around to noticing.

So, my request to anyone who reads this blog is to try the following, if they feel like delving into Wikipedia, follow these tips:

1. Read up on Wikipedia policies before you start.
2. Firstly, have a go at improving the existing pages on AGS games before you create any new ones. Get used to WikiMedia markup, make sure references are done properly, add more sources of notability, etc.
3. Don't bother adding your own game. People writing about their own stuff is frowned on as a conflict of interest.
4. Don't bother adding a game if it hasn't been reviewed in at least 3 non-blog websites, or 2 if one of them is a "proper" printed magazine. Any awards won might also help towards notability, but I don't think Wikipeida recognises many online-only awards as being valid.
5. Take a look at some of the deletion discussions that have concerned AGS games and topics. Don't get angry at those who wanted to delete the pages, but rather see their concerns and make sure that no other AGS-related articles can fall foul of them.
   

But, please, do go and enrich Wikipedia and promote AGS games. Just make sure that what you do doesn't get deleted within a day or two!