King Kaufman's Sports Daily
Down with self-referential navel gazing! Or, Wikipedia and me, Part 2. And did I mention me?
Read more: Sports, Open Source, King Kaufman, Sports Daily, wikipedia
Aug. 11, 2006 | You're going to think this is disingenuous, but it's true: When I wrote Thursday that my Wikipedia entry was one-sentence long and nominated for deletion because of my "non-notable" status, it never occurred to me that doing so would cause people to go beef up the entry and turn it into a real biographical article.
That's because I'm dumb. I wanted to show you something funny, and by pointing it out, I caused the funny part to disappear. Now the funny part is that if I were devious, self-serving and narcissistic -- I mean more devious etc. -- the exact same thing would have happened.
I didn't create the item, didn't ask anyone else to create it and have never touched it, and I think with enough Wikipedia savvy you can look at this list of who's edited the article and figure out that none of them are me. But feel free to think of me as devious, self-serving and narcissistic because that's more fun, and if you're not having fun here, you're not coming back.
Unlike some places, it's all about the customers at King Kaufman's Sports Daily.
I have to admit that while my pathetic entry was funnier, it's pretty cool to be in the people's encyclopedia for real, and it was a lot of fun to keep reloading the page Thursday afternoon and watching the article get written, rewritten, edited and reedited.
Here's what happened: I got turned down for an interview request simply because I work for an online magazine. We online journalists run into this sort of thing from time to time. Whenever I do, I try to politely make the argument that Salon is a legitimate news-gathering organization with a large circulation, a congressional press credential and so on and so forth.
I haven't had to do this for a while so I went searching for some updated info to back up my case. I found the Salon entry on Wikipedia, and was surprised to find my name not just listed, but linked. I had looked to see if there was a King Kaufman Wikipedia entry in the past, and of course there hadn't been, because I am not notable.
Next page: Watching as the wisdom of the crowd writes your biography
