Thursday, October 10, 2013

Mentions in Wikipedia

A few years back, while I was still trying to promote this strip -- these days, I let others spread the word more than I do myself -- I looked for any list of webcomics I could find and then looked for a way onto that list. That's how I got onto The Webcomics List and some other comic rankings.

One list that I tried to get on was the list of comics in Wikipedia. (No link, they don't link here, so forget it. You know where it is.) I added myself, and the addition was deleted. The reason being -- as I was told -- that the list only included comics that had individual wiki pages.

Hey, no prob! I created one of those, using the wiki page I set up at Comic Genesis as a basis. And that page was fast-tracked for deletion because, I don't remember exactly, but something like, it wasn't important or significant enough to include.

Well, shoot, man, that hurt a little. (x, why?) had been around for almost two years at that point, and on two servers, with links coming in from all over. But okay, it was still a relative young comic.

I look at that wikipedia list now (I won't even capitalize them) and notice that there are plenty of webcomics listed that started after mine did in October of 2007. Sure, some are by more established artists, and one or two may have gotten their own TV series or something, but I'm still here, plugging away, too good for wikipedia.

And by total accident today, I discovered that I'm actually listed in wikipedia, not once, but twice. Just not for this comic.

I'm in the list of GURPS books for co-writing GURPS Autoduel. (This I actually knew about.)

But I also have an External Link for the Guardians CCG, which links to its current location, which was supposed to be a temporary placeholder, after the old ISP kicked me off a couple of years ago. (It was sold out from under me.) Here's the funny thing: I haven't updated the content of the Guardains page since BEFORE I started this comic. But that's okay for those folks. Go figure.

3 comments:

GregT said...

Good on you for trying! More to the point, good on you for keeping at it all this time. I'm reminded of when I was doing some research, as I was starting my math web serial. One of the places I ended up at was "Anthropomorphic Personification" at TV Tropes. I found an entire separate page for some comic that personified the periodic table - I looked, there was maybe a dozen strips, it hadn't been updated lately. I can't even find that much today, yet their Tropes page is still there, with far more references than anything I've advertised. Given how TV Tropes is kind of the polar opposite to wikipedia, I wonder if the best reality is somewhere in between.

No idea how it is that you managed supplemental references, I guess some things are just seen as more "popular" (mainstream?). Incidentally, I think you are the only comic still regularly updating from when I was researching over two years ago, so again, well done.

(x, why?) said...

You made it into TV Tropes????

That's even cooler than Wikipedia!

I was a daily reader of Irregular Webcomic, and whenever he did anything he'd link a page to TVT and someone would update TV Tropes the same morning with the example and a link back to his page. I thought that was an awesome place to be, comic-wise.

TV Tropes is a great time vacuum, and to be one of the things draining people's time is something to strive for!

As for my supplemental references, someone who is a fan of Guardians the card game (defunct since 1996, but played by fans into this century), updated a page. Back then, I came late to the game, but I made up for it quickly. It's basically a numbers game, with a lot of humor, and I went through the card combos like you wouldn't believe. My page soon became the number one resource and others deferred to it. One of the creators of the game told people that if you went to my page you would learn something about the game.

GregT said...

Me in TV Tropes? Ha ha, no. Well, not really. A little while into my first run, when I was feeling particularly down, I created a page for "Taylor's Polynomials", tossed in three tropes, and linked it to "Anthro". (I knew how to do it, as I'd created the initial "Being Erica" page there some time earlier.) Two years later, my page is still there with the same three tropes, I don't think it's linked anywhere else, and I don't get site hits from it. Ah well.

Numbers and humour definitely sounds like it's down your alley! I'm super impressed that you had a creator recommend you! I always find it interesting how others can perceive us so differently from how we see ourselves.