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:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheldon_Rampton
And I should emphasize that although I think the practice is
questionable and tacky, I don't think we should ban it outright.
--Jimbo