NZ Racing Wikipedia Pages

[WikiNerd]

Dear all,

Please forgive me if I'm assuming too much starting a whole thread on this, but I'm looking at upgrading the

I've started a stub page for Kenny Smith so far. I've just edited Graeme Lawrence's wikipedia page a bit. Mainly to add a few references. Wikipedia insists that articles are "properly sourced", and they have (collectively) a strong opinion on what being properly referenced is. I noted that GL's page didn't have "enough" references, and might have been at risk of being deleted. (Perhaps this is why Ken Smith didn't have an entry - maybe there was one and it disappeared).

Dave McMillian's page is perhaps at risk as well, so that's on the list of "things to do". I've done a very minor modification to have two references, but there are no references for much of the material.

By "references", Wikipedia expects (and is fussy about) things such as newspaper articles, magazine articles, books, etc. Articles without references, particularly about living people, often disappear. I don't have a huge pile of "NZ Motorsport News" from the past decades.

There is no page for the B&H 500/1000. Other major endurance races such as the Daytona 500 have one, why not B&H?

David Oxton has a well written page, including detailed career stats, which I'd hope (bit by bit) to replicate for other drivers. But, no photos.

To add photos to Wikipedia pages, someone would have to upload their photos to Wikipedia, and then put them under some sort of a free licence. No good for anyone who has valuable photos they want to sell in the present or future, but is there anyone out there that has personal photos they are prepared to share? Once a photo is uploaded and appropriately tagged, then pages can be rewritten to use those photos.

The other thing is that Wikipedia (as a community) can be fussy about making sure that people and things are "notable", and sometimes it seems that people/things are guilty (not notable) until proven innocent. Things such as the Lola Historic site that lists "significant championships" including the Gold Star help a lot. The Motorsports NZ "Wall of Fame" should help there, except I can't read it right now as it seems that the Motorsports NZ pages are down for maintenance.

If people here think it's appropriate, then I wondered if this thread could be a single catch-all for Wikipedia updates, for links to references to be posted, and for listing things to do... I can't afford the time to do massive big projects, but I think this could be the sort of thing that could be done bit by bit here and there, and add up to a slightly bigger presence for the history of NZ racing.

Any comments?

-- Ross