Help keep the Y Combinator Wikipedia page updated
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AkkhSN3vaY4jdF90b1l...
I compiled the info as part of my master's thesis this summer. Likely not 100% correct, but very close.
Would you care to share it when your done? I am putting together a wiki/public database of that kind of info (see elsewhere) and finding reliable data is something I haven't had a free week to do yet :D
My e-mail is in my profile.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/19/silicon-valley-elite-fl...
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/18/y-combinator-demo-day-s...
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/14/y-combinators-demo-day-...
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/14/y-combinator-demo-day-r...
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/16/y-combinator-demo-day-t...
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/09/demo-day-y-combinators-...
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/11/09/the-y-combinator-compan...
Keep in mind every batch had a bunch in stealth mode by Demo Day, so you'd have to do a much more in-depth TC scan to nab them all.
I have to agree, listing all funded organizations is not useful. Just list those which are notable, and mention the total count somewhere
Yes, and Wikipedia is not that place. You know what would be a good place? Somewhere on the YC website.
This might have made sense in 1900s when Encyclopedias came as huge books where space was extremely limited. But putting in less information (than available) in an Encyclopedia today makes no sense to me. Challenge should be to come up with better information filters so that people get what they are looking for, not limiting information all together.
Have only the most notable companies listed on the main Y Combinator page itself, then have a link to a List of Y Combinator-funded startups that lists every last one of them.
There are lots of things which are useful but not notable and do not belong in an encyclopaedia.
A list of companies funded by Y Combinator, unless it's outrageously long (which it wouldn't be at present, right?), might be an entirely sensible thing to have on the WP page about YC even if most of the companies don't deserve their own WP pages.
(Of course there are limits. The WP page about the Oxford English dictionary should not have a section "Words defined in the dictionary".)
YC has funded somewhere around 100 startups, hasn't it?
Kidding aside, I think having a 'scorecard' somewhere is pretty interesting, and quite relevant to YC. Maybe Wikipedia isn't the right place though?
Ycombinator has some listed: http://www.startupwiki.co.uk/investor/ycombinator
But not all of them yet (I haven't had time to add the rest recently)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in...
Die hard inclusionism is as stupid as die hard deletionism. If you cannot understand the opposing viewpoint, you do not understand your own position.
My position is that we should work to improve the tools by which we organize information without ever having to destroy any. I firmly believe that "non-notable" pages should remain marked as such. By default, penalize them in search results and hide them behind a confirmation gate. But don't delete them. Decorate the hell out of them with boxes indicating they don't meet quality standards, but if just one person thought it was notable enough to write about, it deserves to be included. Inclusion need not lead to information dilution. The binary nature of "notability" is overly simplistic, so redirect the destructive energy spent on the deletion debate towards constructive classification of data.
I still wouldn't consider deleting stuff the best solution to that. It just is a matter of organizing the data better. A hard problem, no doubt. I suppose for the YC example, the list of YC Companies could be a separate article.
Maybe this is also a hint as to what the next search engine after Google could provide. I guess that would be more like what Wolfram Alpha had promised to be.
Giving every start-up including the failed ones their own page would be a waste of space, but to give them a single line in a list is pretty good use of the space available I would say.
Even if it is only a one sentence stub, it might be interesting to someone and their mother. No one else will ever know it is there, but a tiny piece of history, no matter how insignificant it may seem now, will be preserved. It's not hurting anybody.
Imagine if some YC startup did some interesting things, but ultimately failed and was promptly forgotten. Two years later, the same team builds something fantastic rooted firmly in the work they had done previously. This new startup becomes an astonishing success. Suddenly, that prior effort (especially why it failed) is noteable. Oh noez! We deleted it!
It is arrogant for any individual or even any group to believe they have any knowledge of what was, is, or will be noteable.
Which in my experience is not the case: if it was interesting or unique people will write about it - and then it is notable.
(wikipedia is not really for recording primary information; that makes it a little useless)
"Fancruft is a term sometimes used in Wikipedia to imply that a selection of content is of importance only to a small population of enthusiastic fans of the subject in question. The term is a neologism derived from the older hacker term cruft, describing obsolete code that accumulates in a program."
Of all the times I've checked faq.html, I never thought to view the source! A commented-out company seems to mean that the startup officially launched at one point but is now acquired or gone (sometimes reincarnated).