Teach42

Hello Dembo,

Yes, adding a Wikipedia entry can be a fickle process. According to Sylvia Martinez, “You have to follow the rules to the letter, and follow up for months defending it.”

The real question that we, as a community, have to answer is whether or not it’s worthwhile to write biographies for significant leaders/contributors to our field. Personally, I think it’s a shame for some people in our field to be represented, while others - equally qualified - go unrepresented.

This page ( http://tinyurl.com/2ec5hj ) offers, at least, a nice start.

Hey, look, I’m quoted from Twitter in a blog comment - quick, someone put up a Wikipedia entry about ME!

But seriously, they are concerned about people using Wikipedia as a vanity site, so the rules about living people are pretty strict.

Any article has to have sources not written by the subject, so no blog, website or self-published book. I guess that might work in favor of academics, and against people who are just popular blogger/commentator/consultant types. Even though you might argue that their impact might be greater. But those are the rules!

Very interesting. I’ll be adding this to my discussion notes for my students when we cover Wikipedia.

But I agree that the process does have a flaw, popular bloggers/speakers have a huge impact and should be recognized.

Pam: Big impact or no, if Wikipedia is truly the egalitarian “everyone’s encyclopedia” that it claims to be, then there should be no restrictions on the creation of anyone’s personal page.

I repeatedly tried to get a local independent bookstore’s page started this summer, and it was continually deleted due to the same reason as Steve’s page was deleted. Of course, the large book retailers like B&N and Borders have pages on Wikipedia. What makes them noteworthy? They sell more books; that’s it. In a few decades time, they will be gone, and other large chains will ahve taken their place, or people will go back to independents. Either way, it’s a bit unfair for the editors of WIkipedia to deem what is noteworthy now and what isn’t as they can’t look into the future.

Over the summer I tried, unsuccessfully, to add “School 2.0″ to Wikipedia. It lasted for a few weeks and had a few edits but the entry did not meet Wikipedia’s guidelines.

I was going to create an entry once for the Andy’s Elevator Postulate…which states that the person who gets on the elevator after you will get off the elevator before you.

I didn’t want it to get deleted, so I just never created it.