The Finch Formerly Known As Gold

13 August 2006

The blessings of obscurity

Last Thursday, Salon.com sportswriter King Kaufman made a semi-horrifying discovery:

Don't know who or why, but someone has created an article about me at Wikipedia.

The article says, in its entirety, "King Kaufman is a sports journalist for the online publication salon.com. He currently resides in St. Louis, Missouri." I have to say: That's pretty accurate!

But you have to scroll down to see that. The first thing you see at the top of the page is:

"It is proposed that this article be deleted, because of the following concern: non-notable."

OK, that hurts a little.

The next day:

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.

Being distinctly less notable than Kaufman, or indeed almost anyone, I presumably don't have to worry about this sort of thing, right?

Posted at 6:49 PM to General Disinterest


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There's a media guy of some note doing a Wiki of blogs. Last I heard he had it up to beta, including an article about me and my blog.

I haven't looked in in a while so I don't know how it's progressing toward rollout.

Posted by: McGehee at 7:15 PM on 13 August 2006

I guess when he reaches kappa, he'll have written something about me.

Posted by: CGHill at 7:36 PM on 13 August 2006

To my surprise, there isn't one yet about Instapundit.

Of course, he doesn't have to do all the writing. And even the subject of an article may do some judicious editing.

Posted by: McGehee at 7:52 AM on 14 August 2006

You got a link for this guy? I'm entirely too curious for my own good.

Posted by: CGHill at 3:21 PM on 14 August 2006

I love Wikipedia as a reference tool, but I think Kaufman is over-estimating the prestige implied by a Wikipedia listing. As he has discovered, just about anybody can get listed. But of course, that's one of the attractions of journalism, writing, and blogging -- some of us derive an inexplicable pleasure from seeing our name plastered on just about any surface.

Posted by: Terry Hull at 3:53 PM on 14 August 2006

Blogopedia.nu

Posted by: McGehee at 10:41 PM on 14 August 2006