Comments on: How to write your own biography in Wikipedia. From the renowned author of “Deconstructing Quantum Sufi-Yoga”

By: Ketan

Ketan — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 04:41:23 +0000

I used to contribute to Wikipedia as well! But somehow never got to observe things like you mention in the post or in the comments, perhaps cuz the kind of articles I used to get involved with very different. I gave up on contributing/editing cuz it was becoming a self-destructive obsession with no fixed end-point so to speak of. I’m happy I could come out of that addiction. I’d started contributing out of sense of obligation that I could not make use of all that infomation & knowledge without giving something in return. And in the same spirit, I am and will remain grateful to all those who make information available to others with no incentives, the way we think incentives to be.

Nice to know you’ve been a Wikipedian as well!

By: Marius

Marius — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 08:11:08 +0000

I was searching for some info on the whole Wiki admin process thing. Guess I found something a bit more interesting than what I was looking for then

By: Anirban

Anirban — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 14:52:59 +0000

Haha… yes I did. I had a forestry special paper during my Master’s.

Thanks for reading.

By: Saumya

Saumya — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 14:35:57 +0000

Wait, you created the Joint Forest Management article? I vaguely remember using that in an Environmental Studies Project in school few years ago, This is, of course, before I knew the unreliability of Wiki posts :p

Hilarious post by the way, love it!

By: Anirban

Anirban — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 18:57:26 +0000

Good for you. For an encyclopedia which claims to be objective, it should hardly matter who writes the darn article. The focus should be on the content meeting their much-vaunted criteria.

By: Gregory Kohs

Gregory Kohs — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 21:40:15 +0000

Excellent sense of humor. But in all seriousness, I’m still making the occasional cash on Wikipedia articles I write for clients who want to mold Wikipedia to their liking. Jimmy Wales hates me for this. I offered to do it all above-board, in the open, but he couldn’t live with even that, so down underground I went.

By: Anirban

Anirban — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 18:22:55 +0000

Thanks, Mark and a warm welcome to the blog.

Best wishes, Anirban

By: Mark Kaigwa

Mark Kaigwa — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 16:43:32 +0000

Well said, Anirban. Quite humorously too. Regards from Nairobi.

By: Anirban

Anirban — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 01:43:04 +0000

Thanks, Claudio.

I am sure you are a well-known musician and musicologist as you mention. I was actively involved in Wikipedia from 2004-2006 and contributed a number of original articles during my time. The English Wikipedia is very US-centric. One of the reasons I left was that the nature of the discussions on topics that had little coverage on the internet was very negative. I found myself constantly having to explain the importance of issues that many administrators did not find important to them.

On the other hand, there are thousands of articles that are nothing more than advertising.

Best wishes to you.
Anirban

By: Claudio

Claudio — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 10:38:23 +0000

Excellent and funny Anirban! No I do not have a Wikipedia article yet. And I should not need to “fake” anything: I am a well-known musician and musicologist, and in a particular field my books (1st one 1978, last one this year) have sold and keep selling very well and have scarcely any competing works. They have also got very favourable published reviews in specialised magazines.

Yet those books are conspicuously absent from the 20-odd Wikipedia entries related to my field, some of which I find really amateurish. Most attempts to have myself or my books mentioned in those articles have failed: there is a Wikipedia editor that deletes my additions saying they are “self promotion”, while inferior and obsolete works are instead repeatedly quoted. Eventually, I published this as a scandal in an online forum, where a senior Wikipedia writer read my post and promised to intervine, asking me that I wrote a few corrections to those articles and suggested including my books under “Discussion”. I did. Nothing happened. The editor did not answer any of my subsequent emails. I gave up. Here and there in the field of musicology I find excellent articles … and also abysmal ones, some of them well-known among musicians for their ridiculous statements. A pity.

Kind regards

Claudio