CFML on Wikipedia

If you've ever looked at the CFML related articles on Wikipedia, you can't fail to have noticed that, especially when compared to other programming articles, they're not very good.

When somebody puts "coldfusion" or "cfml" into Google, they will almost certainly see the respective Wikipedia pages amongst the top three results, but when they follow those links they're unlikely to get a very good impression!

Not only could both these pages themselves benefit significantly from being cleaned up and improved, but there are only a few frameworks and tools that even have pages, and most of what does exist are very unencyclopaedic stubs. And this doesn't even consider the generic programming pages that often don't even mention CFML.

Take a look at the CFML category page - does that category contain everything you would expect an encyclopaedia to cover about CFML? Check the pages for the frameworks you are familiar with - do they go into the level of detail you would expect, and tell you everything you'd want to know if you were entirely new to CFML?

I hope everyone agrees: the CFML presence on Wikipedia can and should be improved, and it's up to the CFML community to do it.

So, I guess you could say I'm starting a campaign - to get all the CFML articles to be ones we can be proud of. I hope everyone in the CFML community will help out with this! Including you!

It doesn't take much - you don't even need to register if you don't want - and if every CFML developer picked one subject and spent ten minutes improving the article or section related to it, we'd have a vast improvement. Surely you can spare just ten minutes for the technology that has saved you countless hours and days of development time?

You don't need to be a professional writer - just write some content for an article, and other people can polish the wording or grammar, if it needs it.

Even if you're too busy (or lazy) to spare some time yourself, you can still help: by taking a few seconds to spread the word and encourage your fellow CFML developers to get involved. The more people that help, the less we all have to do, and the sooner we get some awesome CFML articles!

I've already made a start myself - I've re-vamped the Railo article, and I've created a "CFML nav box" (which gets included when the text {{CFML programming language}} is added to a page), I've created stubs for things like Mura CMS and Mango Blog, and I've made various other changes to assorted pages.

Now it's your turn!

Step 1: Take a look at the CFML category.
Step 2: Pick an article you know about and make some improvements to it.
Step 3: Celebrate; go tell people what you've done, and convince someone else to have a go!

(Of course, you're not limited to only doing one, and if you feel like improving multiple articles, that'd be great!)

If anyone wants to help but is unsure what to write, or has questions about Wikipedia, or whatever else - please do get in touch! I'm by no means an expert on Wikipedia, but if I can't help directly I should at least be able to point you in the right direction.