I am newly obsessed with reading the discusison page on living people who are trying to get their bios changed. There's a great one at
Jaron Lanier's page - all he wants is to not be called a filmmaker, but everyone treats him like a criminal. Over and over, Wikipedia beats into people's heads that they are supposed to assume good faith when someone tries to edit their own bio, and they are supposed to take their word for things. This NEVER happens. Someone ALWAYS gives them a lecture about how an encyclopedia entry is not a bio and how they shouldn't be here, which is direct contradiction to
Wikipedia's guidelines. Poor Phyllis Shlafly's son has been embroiled in one of these forever about the opening paragraph of his mom's
Wikipedia entry. It's totally biased, but because she's a conservative (ostensibly), he can't get anything changed through the liberals that are wikipedia's editors. Actually, checking hers today it seems to be changed, but the pathos and sadness in his plaintive, ineffectual complaints has been fascinating.
All you basically have to do is go to any living person, read their bio, and if there's a discussion page, read it and the odds are better than even that they will be offending the subject of the entry somehow. It's a huge problem, and Jimbo Wales is all too aware of it, and USUALLY there's at least one person trying to say "let's listen to the person" but it never works. And Wikipedia has such a steep learning curve for novices, that the subject inevitably does something horribly wrong like re-write the whole bio that they go and piss everyone off, despite the guidelines pointing out that this might be happen and people should assume good faith. This happened with
Kramer, and it was pretty funy, though he never came out and admitted it was him.
Those are REALLY hilarious too - like the owners of Anna's Taqueria are doing it CONSTANTLY to
their page. WTF? Not a living person, but also kind of entertaining.
I swear, you could spend hours on it. And actually, I do. Every night I'm home, once I'm too tired to coherently answer emails, I lay in front of the computer reading random Wikipedia pages and editing them sometimes. I've started a few stub articles too - I'm working my way up to writing a nice article on Ian Hugo on the next few days.
I cleaned up a piece of vandalism yesterday on an entry about a Lukas Moodyson film,
A Whole in My Heart. The entry said :
Lukas Moodysson has expressed disapproval over the future [[VHS]] and [[DVD]] releases of the movie (the decision to release it was out of his hands) — he would preferred theaters-only release, to avoid children being exposed to it. He has also said that "in a perfect world, this movie would not be made". Lucas Santos has expressed disapproval of a different sort, stating "no one should be exposed to smelly vagina, they sell products for that."
Now who, pray tell, is Lucas Santos? It was up for at least a month. Ha.
Tags: wikipedia
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