Friday, March 25, 2011

Many a Tux Do Not Exist

So I was reading a review of the latest Zorin OS posted over at the Dark Duck blog and the title of it is rather interesting:

"Tux Which Does Not Exist..."

The reason Dark Duck gives for his curious title is the fact that Zorin OS does not exist on what is respected by many as the one stop shop for most all information on the internet - Wikipedia. Now I am not sure as to why Zorin OS does not have a page there, but I would not be terribly surprised if it was for a similar reason Bodhi Linux still does not have a Wikipedia page.

Wikipedia moderators are inconsistent and sometimes just jerks!

A couple months after I first release Bodhi Linux into the wild, one of our many users erected a Wikipedia page about Bodhi. It was promptly taken offline due to a citing for lack of notability. At that point, this was a 100% fair assumption - our project was only a couple months old and really the only place that had mentioned it was my own blog here.

About a month ago one of our users put up a page for Bodhi again. This time we where listed on distro watch, had write ups on ghack, webup8, omgubuntu, techrepublic, and about a dozen other Linux/tech orientated websites. We are quickly attaining our goal - becoming the standard for what people think of when they look for an Enlightenment distribution. This time the page stuck - success! We had achieved a noteworthy status.

In case you didn't know, Wikipedia articles are case sensitive. The page that had stuck around for about two weeks was located at Bodhi_Linux. Another of our users (not realizing we already had one) put up another page with the title Bodhi_linux. This page was correctly flagged as a duplicate and promptly deleted - the issue? The moderator that deleted the duplicated page also took a look at previous page and this moderator decided there was not enough about the project there for the page to exist. Never mind the fact that it had already been up for two weeks and had already been approved by another moderator.

The kicker? There are at least a dozen or so other Linux distributions listed on Wikipedia that have seen far less attention than Bodhi has or have been around for just as long (or less) time. Yes I know Wikipedia is a volunteer service it is just a shame that we cannot get some consistency among the decisions those volunteers make. We will have a page eventually I am sure, but at this point I am not terribly worried about it.

~Jeff Hoogland

17 comments:

  1. "Becoming the standard..."?? Not even close, sorry.

    ReplyDelete
  2. When you think of E desktop plus Linux, which distro do you think of then?

    ReplyDelete
  3. PCLinuxOS17. It has themes by Agust and it`s a full-featured OS based around Enlightenment. Yours just isn`t there yet.

    ReplyDelete
  4. @r:
    If you even knew a little about Bodhi you would know that Agust is our in-house themer.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Agust? Who's that?

    Kind of rings a bell ... lemme think ...

    Oh, you mean this guy who has made this theme and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one, all for Bodhi.

    It's not even worth the effort to reply to your "full-featured" nonsense.

    cheers

    ReplyDelete
  6. Of course I know, I`ve tried Bodhi. But he was active at the other one long before Bodhi came along. Look, I`m not getting into a flamewar with fanbois, I`m just saying that statement about being the standard was absurd. Carry on...

    ReplyDelete
  7. @r See, I'm pretty sure it was only Bodhi that was mentioned by E developers @ Cebit 2011 this year regarding E on the desktop:

    http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Open-Source-at-CeBIT-2011-1206993.html?page=2

    ReplyDelete
  8. Bodhi Linux wouldn't even spring to mind for any Linux distro let alone e17

    ReplyDelete
  9. I`m not getting into a flamewar with fanbois
    Nor will we respond to misinformed and dishonest ("Of course I know") trolls. Move along.

    cheers

    ReplyDelete
  10. I'd add a comment, but all references seem to have been removed so I can no longer substantiate anything I might say!

    ReplyDelete
  11. Ignore the trolls Jeff & Co., and please keep up the amazing work!
    I typically hop distros every month or so, but I've kept Bodhi as the singular OS on my laptop since it was released in Alpha. That is as much a ringing endorsement as I am qualified to give.

    And to the trolls, let us put the situation in perspective-
    Bodhi had a spot on Wikipedia for two weeks WHILE STILL IN BETA, despite the horribly broken moderator system Wikipedia maintains.
    Just think what they'll accomplish with their full release (which i just saw was released today! Downloading now).

    -Cheers

    Matt

    ReplyDelete
  12. Hey, you know about volunteers, in this case I sympathise with you, but to here you tell it, you'd
    think your Ubuntu or Fedora or ...
    To echo another commentator, your NOT there yet.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Heinrich DeutschländerMarch 26, 2011 at 8:40 PM

    Your distribution is great (keep up the good work!), and certainly deserves an article on Wikipedia by this point, but...

    your question is a little misleading; if you ask even most mainstream GNU/Linux users (much less newbies) what's the best distribution using Enlightenment, most users would respond "what the heck is Enlightenment?" At this point, it is even less well-known than something like Awesome WM (which at least is popular amongst the Arch crowd), and that is saying something.

    Perhaps, if Bodhi ends up being a smashing success, you will help popularise E as CrunchBang and the (IMHO better) distros like ArchBang that it inspired have helped revitalise OpenBox. In the other direction, however, I would not count on E to help popularise Bodhi.

    ReplyDelete
  14. I am back, since I`m not a troll, to officially apologize about my earlier remarks. Although I`m still not sure about the statement made, it can be written off as a young developer`s enthusiasm and it may possibly be true. I will explain. I had tried one of the earliest builds and wasn`t too impressed, perhaps because of the difference that Enlightenment is. I have just installed the stable release and it is a joy to use and look at. (Love the tree and leaves blowing around, lol). Fast, especially with Chromium, and small, (installed on 2GBs I had Peppermint on). So, eating some delicious crow and saying, "Carry on, Bodhi! Carry on, indeed!"

    ReplyDelete
  15. Sure thing, Jeff. I just tell it like I think it is, in my own opinion. Having found that I was totally wrong about Bodhi I felt the need to let you know, and all who read this. Good luck, sir.

    ReplyDelete
  16. The wikipedia mods also deleted the Chakra Linux page and that project has been around a long time.

    ReplyDelete