Ray Saintonge wrote:
Thomas Dalton wrote:
But the fact is, Who's who is/was also based on user-submitted autobiographies. The editors made a list of people who "should" be in there, and sent invitations with a form where the person could fill in details about family, education, career, publications, awards, and hobbies. I'm not sure how the editors fact checked the entries. Perhaps the risk of public shame was enough to keep people from lying.
What makes you think people didn't lie?
What makes you think they did?
Because people tend to sort of do this thing, in such circumstances -- tone up the positives, tone down the negatives. I was translating the entries for the equivalent of the mentioned biographical dictionaries once. Another example is how like everybody's bio in post-Soviets of 1990s sort of suddenly lost any relation to the Communist party.
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