Evan Ratliff

w:Evan Ratliff is a recently-created Wikipedia article about an eclectic journalist that a few of us are following. The article is being used to test Wikipedia's policy and process for deletions. The article was deleted once and carried a deletion tag for a few hours. Now we are watching to see how the article and the unique current event that it describes are playing out both in its article history and on the web.

Curator: CQ (yeoman)

Article seed

Evan Ratliff from Wired Magazine is conducting an experiment by seemingly vanishing as far as knowledge of his physical whereabouts.. Wired has offered a $5000 reward for anyone who can find him. He is still "on the grid" and at large but communicating with his followers on Twitter. The publicity stunt may be to call attention to Internet related unemployment. The Google Wave development group has even proposed using the phenomenal ploy as a test case for the new technology pushing the frontier of real-time web activity. Ratliff is using his specially created blog to taunt the "hunters" . Facebook groups have emerged to team up and find him or to help him remain at large

New top matter added

5 hours and 20 minutes later, Top matter was added by w:User:Shreevatsa to improve the article's relevance and notability. The second deletion tag was removed and the {{current}} tag and the seed portion were moved to a new section titled, Experiment.

Introduction: "Evan Ratliff is a contributor to Wired Magazine and one of the coauthors of Safe: the race to protect ourselves in a newly dangerous world. His article The Zombie Hunters: On the trail of cyberextortionists, written for The New Yorker in 2005, was featured in The best of technology writing 2006."

As a current event

w:User:SmackBot updated the {{current}} tag with the date {{Current section|date=August 2009}} One question now is if Evan's experiment is notable enough for the Portal:Current events/Science and technology.

So far - so good CQ 21:04, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Evidently not according to w:User:Yellowdesk

Improvement

• Another reference to the $5K reward was added by Mu301 on 28 August 2009
• Later on the 28th, An anonymous editer added some links and the Clues section..
• Also on the 28th a blurb and reference I added when I hastily started the article: The publicity stunt may be to call attention to Internet related unemployment. was removed by Dzjim (pronounced "jim") with the edit summary Removed claim not made by cited article..
• On September 4 someone with the the same IP as above added a link to a Facebook page Posted by Jeff Reifman which transcludes Evan Ratliff’s Playlist at wired.
• The <reference /> tag was changed to {{reflist}} here

suggestions please

Evan found

An anonymous user posted He was tracked to and found on September 8, 2009 in New Orleans by @vanishteam, a group participating in the challenge to find him. The post included an inline reference.

• The next several edits by this user convert the Experiment section from present to past tense.
• ...

Notes

w:User talk:CQ shows how a user is notified by the bots and humans doing the deletions. 18:09, 23 August 2009 (UTC)