Talk:John Coate

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John Coate and the WELL: Looking Ahead by Looking Back at an Early Online Community Cullen328 (talk) 00:49, 14 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I considered using this in my original draft, but was unsure Social Media Today would be considered an independent, authoritative source. If you think it's good, material can be added from it to the entry. Oldgirlpop (talk) 17:36, 15 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

In the teahouse, I was asked to use this page to give more details on the sources used to establish Coate's notability. As one of the first employees and a central figure in creating the early online community of the WELL, John Coate is mentioned in Katie Hafner's book on pages 39-40, 42, 46, 53, 55-56, 60, 62, 81, 84, 88-89, 100, and 107, and his departure to create SFGate is mentioned on 155. Coate's role in managing the WELL community is mentioned in Fred Turner's book about Stewart Brand and The WELL on pages 146-148, 155 and 159. His work with the WELL is described in Gal Beckerman's book on online activism on pages 150, 152-157 and 161-162. His essay "Cyberspace Innkeeping," an early list of best practices for online moderators, was collected in a book edited by Philip Agre and I was able to find and detail at least three academic citations to it, which have been referenced in this draft, but others exist and can be added if necessary. Detailed citations to these sources are in the article references; I was afraid repeating them here would clutter up the talk page. The notability of The WELL itself has long been recognized by Wikipedia, and some of its other founders already have pages (Howard Rheingold, Stewart Brand).--Oldgirlpop (talk) 18:44, 15 September 2022 (UTC)oldgirlpop[reply]

I have added the Vanessa DiMauro article and The Economist's review of Gal Beckerman's book, which calls Coate the "godfather of social media." I have searched Poynter and Editor & Publisher for independent confirmation of the number of pageviews for SFGate, but without luck, and based on my time in the news industry, I think it's unlikely an independent source for those numbers exist. With all the other sources, I believe his notability does not rest on the Chronicle stories cited, and as I noted in the Teahouse discussion, at the time these stories were written, SFGate was operated independently of the Chronicle and owned jointly with one of the Chronicle's competitors. I do believe they add valuable information about what SFGate was like under his management, but that the entry stands on its own without them. Oldgirlpop (talk) 19:09, 19 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Noted that the dates are mostly shewn as March 2022 (and one 15 December 2021).--Rocknrollmancer (talk) 22:59, 15 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I had pulled these sources originally for an earlier editing project. I did access most of them again this week due to the teahouse discussion and can update them. Oldgirlpop (talk) 16:37, 16 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]