Sheldon Rampton wrote:
At a very minimum, it seems most tasteful for anyone about whom we do have an entry to recuse themselves from working on it.
Um...I've done some edits to the Wikipedia article about me (which was originally created by Ed Poor).
Yes, and I think this is a good case-in-point about the problems that can easily arise from the practice.
1. POTENTIAL FOR PERSONAL CONFLICT
You added:
PR Watch monitors deceptive and manipulative public relations firms, such as the creation of "front groups" -- organizations that purport to represent a popular public agenda, when in fact their message is tailored to serve the specific interests of a client whose sponsorship of the organization is hidden.
Ed Poor removed that line with the comment "(moved self-serving ... text to talk)". And of course since then, famously, you two have been at each others throats. I'm not suggesting a direct causal connection, but just showing how articles about ourselves are fraught with the possibility of conflict.
(You wisely chose to let that one go, it seems.)
You're well-liked around here. I like you. But in my local newspaper, I read an editorial you wrote (an excerpt from _Weapons of Mass Deception_, I believe) that almost made my head explode. :-) I thought it wasn't just mistaken, but deeply misleading. And I think that your posture in that piece as some kind of neutral arbiter exposing PR spin was absurd -- the piece itself was a masterpiece of spin.
And yet the article reads like pure hagiography. It's a perfectly appropriate self-biography for PR purposes, but it completely fails as encyclopedia material. And I think that most people will naturally, and rightly, refrain from adding criticism of your work there, _as a matter of personal courtesy_, because you edit it yourself, and you are known and liked here.
2. UNVERIFIABLE INFORMATION
You are an expert on yourself, to be sure. So, who could possibly challenge you on such statements as "At the age of three, his family moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, where his father worked as a musician"?
3. GOOD TASTE
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, a reference work, not a tool for our own self-promotion. I can easily envision a mocking criticism of us as a non-serious work if we all start writing entries about ourselves. "Of the 1,234 page-length biographies in wikipedia, fully 10% of them are of Wikipedia contributors writing about themselves." Ick.
I don't see how this is inappropriate. I arguably have a "conflict of interest" in what I write about myself, but on the other hand, I know quite a bit about the topic. Anyway, there's nothing in the Wikipedia rules to prohibit people with conflicts of interest from contributing. We don't ask people who work for drug companies to recuse themselves from posting information about health-related topics.
Nor do we prohibit left-wing anti-corporate book authors to recuse themselves from those articles, either. You're right of course that although conflict-of-interest is a critical problem in autobiographical material, it isn't in and of itself persuasive as a reason to refrain from the practice.
What I think is that the things I've outlined above -- potential for personal conflict, unverifiable information, and good taste -- all build on the conflict-of-interest problem in such a way as to argue persuasively against the practice.
Let me say it another way -- it isn't so much the conflict-of-interest that's a problem, it's that personal courtesy prevents people from editing an article about you that you've edited yourself, with the result being an entry that is not encyclopedic.
I'm mentioning this now partly as a heads-up so that if anyone DOES object to the way I've contributed to my own article, they should feel invited to fix it the usual wiki way -- by making whatever revisions they feel are appropriate. Here's the URL:
And I should emphasize that although I think the practice is questionable and tacky, I don't think we should ban it outright.
--Jimbo