Talk:Shelfari

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Hello, I've made some changes by taking away some sentences I felt were not neutral. Is the tone better? Let me know. Thanks.Psstpnoy 07:07, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Criticism conundrum

This is the founder of LibraryThing, a competitor. I have refrained from changing the following part:

Shelfari has also been criticized for falsely claiming to have been "the first social media site focussed on books". [7]

I feel that it might be better to contextualize this. I am the person cited, but my company is a competitor with them. While I criticized them for this, for spamming and for astroturfing--for which they apologized--and generally have a low opinion of their tactics, I don't think it's fair to say that they have been criticized without noting the source is hardly impartial.

I would either find someone impartial who said this, put something in about the partiality of the source or remove it.

[edit] Other suggestions

  • I would love to see the Wikipedia community figure out who WAS the first site of this kind. It's not LibraryThing. I think one might start with Bibliophil.org or SingleFile (now defunct). It would make an interesting paragraph in the Social cataloging article.
  • I would not capitalize "Blog widget."
  • "Shelfari users build virtual bookshelves of the titles they own, love, or have read, and rate, review, and tag them." is awkward.
  • "Individuals are able to sign up for free and register an unlimited number of books." Does Shelfari allow organizations to do it? I think so, but I don't know. Certainly LibraryThing has a lot of churches and other small organizations, and I'm guessing Shelfari does too.
  • The desription of the widget with "1)" and "2)" isn't good prose.
  • Overall punctuation is placed in the UK manner, not the US manner favored by the Chicago Manual and etc.
  • There is public information about some of Shelfari's other investors, eg., http://asack.typepad.com/a_sack_of_seattle/angel_investing/index.html and http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/2007/11/great_example_o.html. This should be in there.
  • The paragraph about spam should probably be roughly dated. At that point the entry has turned into a sort of informal history, with dates leading developments, so I think this should have the same format. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Lectiodifficilior (talk • contribs) 20:05, 16 November 2007 (UTC)
Thank you for your concern about impartiality. Wikipedia's policies generally discourage use of self-published sources, with the exemption of those produced by established experts or by the subject of an article; this and the potential conflict of interest seemed to me enough reason to remove the "first site" criticism. If a similar criticism is made or reported by, say, a newspaper, then I'd be happy for it to be added back. -- EALacey (talk) 20:20, 16 November 2007 (UTC)
I've made some stylistic changes following your suggestions. Could you clarify your point about UK punctuation? If you're referring to punctuation outside quotation marks where it isn't part of the quotation, that's following Wikipedia's own manual of style. -- EALacey (talk) 20:32, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

Oh, blech. Wikipedia chose wrong! :) -- Lectiodifficilior (talk) 21:43, 16 November 2007 (UTC)