Chekhov's Mistress
The End of Wikipedia as Self Promotion Goes Unchecked
I’ve long been awed by Wikipedia, but now that Wikipedia (as in wikipedia yourself) seems to be becoming a verb, I think less of it and wonder if the phenomenon of self promotion on Wikipedia will ultimately lead to the end of its credibility.
I first discovered people Wikipediaing themselves a while back when I was searching for someone on the net who happened to be a first time author. I found her on Wikipedia, of course, with her own page that happened to be created just around the time the book was released. I can’t of course say that she (or her publicist, or a loving friend) put the entry up there, but generally speaking I’d say it’s against Wikipedia rules that you can’t put up autobiographical material or material that benefits the creator (or the creator’s girlfriend, let’s say). Look around, all the cool kids have Wikipedia pages (I don’t, although I started the stub for the entry Litblog many moons ago)
Okay, this isn’t new and we’re all big kids here and maybe just maybe if the Encyclopaedia Britannica were flexible enough we’d have an entry for everyone who ever wrote a book or whatever. But, today I saw what I thought at first was a joke: Get Noticed on Wikipedia: Increase and influence your web presence on the world’s largest encyclopedia, which is a video that Media Bistro is selling for $15, clearly aimed at people updating their own pages:
“Wikipedia lends credibility to you or your company, it allows you to maintain public awareness of who you are and what you do, and it provides a venue for which you can put forth clear and factual information about you and your endeavors”
so the preview video says. Who buys this crap, I don’t know (perhaps the same type of people who buy books on making it big in real estate or precious metals), but what it means to me is that Wikipedia will ultimately become little more than Facebook or Linked-in. Maybe I’ll soon get an email saying that “John wants to invite you to add a link to his Wikipedia page from yours.”
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About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: July 10, 2007
- Filed Under:
Blogging & Social Media
- Comments:0
- Links to this Post: Technorati
