Self-Googling Can Make You Blind - If Not Disappear Entirely

[steepholm]

Okay, I occasionally self-google, I admit it. Don't come over all smarty-pants, please.

Tom Sawyer attended his own funeral; Scrooge read his own epitaph. I have now seen my name weighed in the balance, and found... just about okay. My Wiki page, which grew like a mushrump some years ago, was eventually identified as the work of drachentaube. He had (to be fair) only put down some of the quantifiablest facts about my life. But these were insufficiently eminent for at least one Wiki editor, and it's interesting to see what factors were important in saving my biographical bacon. The most effective Wiki-arguments turned out to be:

* the number of libraries who held my books
* the reviews I'd got

(However, a Mythopoeic Award counts for squat.)

My Wiki page has now been updated on these lines, rendering it (to me at least) more or less unreadable. I'm sure the Wiki editors think this evidence-based approach to writing encyclopaedias is the most professional way to go about things, but I'd rather have someone judge my worth by, say

* knowing who I was
* having read one or more of my books
* understanding something of the fields I participate in

and, in general

* having some basic sense of context.

If they don't have any of the above, it would be better either to keep Wikipedia as an open product that enthusiasts could contribute to as seems good to them, or else to go for a much narrower, more verifiable kind of resource. If my own page is typical, the bean-countng approach to biography is not a halfway house: it's a mess.

Comments

[gillo]

That's a very badly-written entry in almost every way. It makes no mention of genre and doesn't even follow conventions for capitalising titles. There is absolutely no sense of you as a person, academic, writer or individual. Someone needs a good arse-kicking, frankly.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Seconded!

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I'm glad it wasn't just me!

[calimac.livejournal.com]

That's a particularly badly-written and uninformative entry. That may be relieving, or further distressing.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm not distressed - I don't know if anyone has ever even read the entry, and at least it doesn't say anything that's actually untrue or defamatory - but it's pretty shoddy work.

[ashkitty.livejournal.com]

Wow. That's so completely useless. If I look up someone on Wikipedia, I want to know something more relevant than who's reviewed their books. What the hell do I need that for?

Also, a Mythopoeic Award doesn't count? This is why I feel that these things should be decided by people who know what the hell they're talking about.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

If I look up someone on Wikipedia, I want to know something more relevant than who's reviewed their books. What the hell do I need that for?

I can just about follow their thinking in using it as some kind of rough measure of whether I was worth keeping in the encyclopaedia at all (even if it doesn't impress me as a method), but why they thought it would be good to clutter up the entry itself with that stuff - well, I'm at a loss.

[ashkitty.livejournal.com]

That's it exactly; I can see it as a test of 'why this person should be on wiki' (though frankly I think the person who put it up for deletion is an idiot; if being 'in a few hundred libraries' and having a decently impressive award does not make one a Real Author (TM), wtf does?) but it reads more like a PR page than an informative entry.

[gair.livejournal.com]

Exactly - it looks to me like a terminal confusion between the behind-the-scenes test of relevance and the actual content of the page. I haven't seen any other author pages that look like this...

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

For obvious reasons, Google is something I fear at one level, hence the pseudonym on here, but I'm glad that most of the entries concern my professional life- reviews, citations, articles, poetry (and recipes) and I can live with that!

The advantage of having done all that stuff before the advent of teh intarwebz, I guess! :o)

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've been known to self-google, too. And I can't help mischievously wondering how many people realise that the writer of Star Wars fan fiction and the respectable presenter of papers on the Bronze Age are one and the same.

Not many, I hope...