

Could folks please help me get DigitalOcean onto wikipedia? (deleted thrice) - niels_olson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review#DigitalOcean

======
dangrossman
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.

~~~
captainmuon
> 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).

~~~
Sae5waip
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a company index.

------
justincormack
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...](http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/12/11/digitalocean-now-growing-
faster-than-amazon.html</ref>). 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...](http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/03/06/andreessen-horowitz-
backs-digitalocean-a-cloud-computing-start-up/</ref>)

== References ==

{{reflist}}

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.

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

~~~
farski
I think you need to get the article to be on the same level as, eg,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oculus_VR](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.

------
mrsaint
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.

~~~
niels_olson
How can you see that?

------
evan_
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.

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

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

------
svisser
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).

~~~
niels_olson
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Niels_Olson/DigitalOcean)

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

~~~
k0
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.

------
iaskwhy
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.

~~~
justincormack
I posted it here
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7610483](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.

~~~
iaskwhy
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linode)

~~~
justincormack
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.

------
retrodict
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.

~~~
taejo
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".

------
niels_olson
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Niels_Olson/DigitalOcean)

~~~
dangrossman
> 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.

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

