The officiousness of Wikipedia (my bio still sucks)

My English Wikipedia bio has sucked for as long as it’s existed. (Sometimes it doesn’t exist, as I’m of questionable notability.)

When I thought about it in 2015, I decided the most helpful thing to do would be to create a Biography Factoid page in my user space, with specific claims as well as a selected bibliography, nicely formatted using the {{citation}} template. Making the edits myself would be a conflict of interest, but a little editorial judgment and trivial copying-and-pasting by someone else could fix things up nicely. That never happened.

Three years later, in 2018, I looked into it again, made use of the {{request edit}} template, and made two specific suggestions in the form of “change x to y.” I asked them to fix my employment/affiliations and the publication date of Good Faith Collaboration, which is correct in its own article. Neither took.

Last month, I was introduced at a small conference with incorrect information, obviously taken from my Wikipedia biography. I resigned myself to once again attempting to correct the most egregious mistakes. You can see the result on the biography’s talk page.

I appreciate the Wikipedian’s timely response. However, presumably, most of those requesting corrections to a Wikipedia article about themselves are not experienced Wikipedians. Yet, in the Wikipedian’s response we have fairly complicated instructions, requiring the use of template parameters, referencing policy-X-stroke-6, which itself appears in a reference section, and accompanied by a notes section. All of this in an effort to avoid specifying the date at which I left W3C/MIT without a source, which appears in a parenthetical “(1996-2003).” And the publishing date of Good Faith Collaboration still remains uncorrected!

This isn’t the worse officiousness I’ve encountered at Wikipedia, a distinction reserved for some of the folks who help clear photograph permissions at Commons. The legally incorrect, jargon-filled, templated awfulness there is unsurpassed.

Of course, this is not new and I try not to just complain about it. With permissions-common, I’ve translated the officiousness into comprehensible prose, made suggestions for writing clearly, and even volunteered to help them with their canned responses—to no avail.

With respect to my bio, I think all that awfulness could be replaced with the following: “Please go ahead and paste and fix the problematic prose here, on the talk page, including a source for your end date at MIT/W3C. If there’s no such source, we can use {{circa|2012}} since that’s the date of your last update on their page for you. I’ll then confirm at port it over.” I don’t know if that’s the correct response, but if it is, that’s a friendlier way to put it.

Open Codex Code & Culture

Other articles

Accident, luck, contingency, and meaning

Factoids for Wikipedia

Not notable: Dead to Wikipedia

Wikipedia and GamerGate

Wikipedia's citation mess and how to cope

Wikipedia vs. The Small Screen

Wikipedia and gendered categories

Talking about "Free as in Sexist?"

Wikipedia and modes of encyclopedic production

Other articles

blogroll

social