Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

"My" Article on Delrina Featured on Wikipedia
Today the article I largely wrote on Wikipedia appears on its front page as the "Feature Article of the Day". I say "largely" because anybody can edit or add material on Wikipedia, but in this case I'd say that at least 95% of what's there is mine, and certainly all of the research.

It all started back in the summer when I decided to write a short blurb on Delrina on Wikipedia, which was the first company I worked at in the hi-tech sector. The article was maybe a couple hundred words tops, and it covered the basics: how it came to be, its main products and its buyout by Symantec in 1995.

Then sometime in the Fall I received an email from a student in the States who had managed to track me down and ask me for some further corporate details about the firm as he was writing a paper and was checking up on a reference. I gave him the info he was looking for, and he concluded the email exchange by expressing regret that there wasn't more information available on former software firms.

That was a challenge, so I decided to research and write up the topic properly. Thanks to the Wayback Machine I tracked down old Delrina press releases dating back to 1994, and managed to piece together earlier product launches and business news based on archived articles and reviews from such older computer magazines as Byte and Computing Canada. I got a fair copy of the company logo as well as a promotional box shot of CommSuite '95 thank to a complimentary copy of the program that I had kept. Thanks to Google Images I managed to track down other relevant product screenshots and promotional box shots. I had worked in the fax and communications division at the firm, and never really had a lot of contact with the forms division which was housed in a separate building from where I was working, so I never really understood much about their line of products. So I made a trip to the local reference library one afternoon and dug up the old corporate reports, and managed to fit all of the pieces together in my understanding of how the forms products worked and which markets they were aimed at. That research also turned up significantly more info about the company's corporate structure, and answered a few remaining questions I had about other product lines, especially how the screensaver/multimedia division came to be.

I also managed to dig up more information online with regard to the Berkeley Systems Inc. vs. Delrina case, where the company was sued by Berkeley for parodying its famous "flying toasters" screensaver. In Delrina's version, the Bloom County figure Opus the penguin character shoots down flying toasters as they flock overhead. I remembered a bit about this from my time at Delrina, and remembered that the company's solution was to change the wings on the toasters to propellers instead, but my researches revealed more info about the case, including the fact that Delrina took the stance that the product ought to be considered exempt from copyright and trademark infringement based on American First Amendment rules that protect those doing parody from prosecution. The political comedian and satirist Mark Russell even argued this case in Delrina's defense. In the end the court case didn't go the way Delrina had wanted, and the result set an important precedent -- all of which was documented in summary format on Wikipedia.

Once the article had reached a couple thousand words in length I submitted it to a round of peer review, followed by two excruciating rounds of Featured Article Candidate review before it was accepted as being of sufficient quality to be considered a Featured article, among the best Wikipedia has to offer. I got a lot of good comments from all of the review processes, but I also found a lot of them overly nit-picky, and I sometime find the "house style" of writing standards at Wikipedia to clash with my own writing style. But I learned how to write better Wikipedia articles as a result, and managed to successfully usher the Delrina article to Feature status. And today it is the Featured Article of the Day.

Am hoping to get one or two other articles up there as well, such as the currently sprawling article on the Canadian National Exhibition, or on the Royal Ontario Museum or the McLaughlin Planetarium.

Now that it has prominence on the mainpage, it's funny to see how the article has been lightly mangled thanks to the fersh attention it is getting. By my count it has already undergone just over 30 additional edits since it was posted on the main page, mainly people being very picky about wording ("’end-of-lifed' is not a word" is one example, replaced with the less industry-specific term "discontinued"), various minor format tweakings and the usual idiotic instances of vandalism, which is especially pointless for a featured article since it is almost immediately reverted by a subsequent administrator. None of the changes are what I would call substantive though.

In the end though, it is nice way to mark the 10th anniversary of the passing of the company, and indirectly, of my time there.