A Proposal: SF Author Bios Should Be Moved from Wikipedia to the ISFDB Wiki

Preface: In the olden days, before the invention of sliced bread and the can opener, those of us seeking info on science fiction authors on the Internet used to get it from the Internet Science Fiction Data Base (ISFDB). It was absolute hell when we anthologists were working on deadline writing story notes for a book and the ISFDB went down. And one of the things they used to have sometimes were author bios. And this was good.

For bandwidth reasons, I gather, the ISFDB abdicated this function to Wikipedia. I  think this was a serious mistake which needs to be corrected. From the ISFDB FAQ:

The old ISFDB had a place for author biographies; where did they go? The ISFDB database layout is great for well-structured data like titles, series names, and ISBN's. It doesn't work so well for free-form text like an author biography. The ISFDB author biographies were always an area of great churn, and mediating submitter differences could be difficult. We're now relying on Wikipedia as the location for author biographies, and we formally support linking an author's bibliography to their Wikipedia biography.

Proposal: I propose that science fiction author bios be moved from Wikipedia to the ISFDB Wiki.

After a brief experience with Wikipedia, its editors strike me as a pack of officious trolls whose main concern is to make sure that you don't actually know the people you are writing about. The science fiction field doesn't work that way. I know hundreds (maybe over a thousand) science fiction writers, editors, and fans. Many, many of them could be described as my "associates."  Am I connected to most members of the professional science fiction community in some way? You bet.

I've helped run a Hugo-nominated SF semiprozine for a couple of decades, I edit two year's best volumes, and am married to one of the most eminent editors in the field. But this connectedness holds true of really a lot of the people doing the actual biographies: Perhaps their connections are not so visible or so obvious, but the SF field is like one big extended family. We've all slept on each other's couches. We've bought each other drinks. We marry each other's daughters. . . . It's Clan Fandom.

And of those creating biographies that don't know their subjects, what they are mostly doing is lifting the ISFDB bibliographies wholesale and transplanting the content over to Wikipedia.

So lets have a revolution. Let's take the SF and fantasy bios over to the ISFDB Wiki and pull out of Wikipedia. Can we do this?

Or have I misjudged the Wikipedia sysops? Are they really reasonable people who will let people who actually know what they are talking about write there?

SEE ALSO: Jed Hartman's mediation on the state of affairs at Wikipedia: Wikipedia and sf. He provides an excellent example of exactly what I'm talking about:

Somewhat similarly, [Teresa Nielsen Hayden] wrote a great article at Wikipedia a while back, about Roger Elwood, that consisted mostly of personal anecdotes. It was well-written and full of personality (like some of the old Britannica articles by major authors once were), and I couldn’t bring myself to attach a note to it saying “This is, unfortunately, not the right style or approach for Wikipedia.” But, sadly, it wasn’t. And the article has subsequently been rewritten to fit Wikipedia better, though the current version (last I checked) contains a link to TNH’s version. The Talk page for that article is a perfect example of clash of Wikipedia culture with sf culture: TNH gave a long and impassioned and compelling argument in favor of her version, but unfortunately her approach was wrong according to established Wikipedia policy.

According to the rules and standards explained to me last night, none of the great living critics (TNH being one) ought to be allowed to write about sf writers.

Also, since ISFDB now has a Wiki, it makes sense to move the Wiki entries on its writers closer to the source from which many of the SF writer bios are lifted.

SEE ALSO, John McDaid:

Let's take a concrete example, an icon of the sf field, Damon Knight. A driving force in the Golden Age of science fiction, author, editor, founder of SFWA and Clarion, I mean, you just can't overestimate his impact on the field. Here's what he gets in Wikipedia.

What's not there is precisely the kind of insight offered by people who knew Damon.

See also Evil Genius Chronicles: Science Fiction Authors, Revolt from Wikipedia!

Although there is a lot to be said about the value of Wikipedia, the one time I got a glimpse into its governance, I was pretty shocked. When my bio was removed from there, the key question was whether or not Dave Slusher the podcaster was the same guy who did the radio show Reality Break in the 90s. The issue was solved when one of them concluded “that fact was not possible to determine.” Of course, the “above the fold” link from this blog (which hosts the podcast) to the radio show or the fact that searching in my search box turns up posts about me doing the radio show didn’t matter, that fact was not determinable. Umm, OK.

I guess I should add that I have two kinds of vested interests in the matter of where the authoritative author bios in SF reside on the web and that they are any good.

1. First of all, material generated by this household, in the form of story notes, essays of our own, and essays published in The New York Review of Science Fiction, is often the source of the source of the source of what factoids about authors end up on Wikipedia.
2. Secondly, because we regularly use the Internet as a research tool when composing such things, we need there to be author bios by people who actually know something about the people who they're writing about, not just bios by people who know how to Google. (I know how to Google, too!)

In terms of my ability to cite sources unacceptable to Wikipedia, I don't thing it would cut much ice in the troll cave to mention that I live in one of the best libraries of science fiction lit & crit in the country. We have -- you know -- books, actual books here. 30,000 of them.

UPDATE: So let's rally the troops and move it all to ISFDB Wiki if they'll take us back. Here's my favorite quote from the "editors" so far:

You shouldn't have created the page in the first place. If you are really notable, someone else would have done so.

This was a direct response to my complaint when she cut the citations to articles mentioning me in the NYT, Forbes, the BBC, etc.

UPDATE: See also the official blog of the Science Fiction Book Club and Mark Bernstein.

UPDATE: It is interesting to consider the issues raised by this situation in light of this blog post, Medias Bias vs. 'The Blog Mob', contrasting the main stream media and the blogging community. It discusses a recent Wall Street Journal Op-Ed attacking blogging. 

I imagine that’s one story the WSJ has been tempted to pull from their site - and the four comments they allowed through were likely just a smattering of the number they actually received in response to these elitist statements (my own at least, and those of several others I know, didn’t past muster). And, this is exactly where blogging has some substance and weight - as its very nature invites feedback. If technology has pulled people out of community town hall meetings, fostering television-fed apathy amongst its citizenry, then blogging technology is bringing them back.

If a blog has any kind of readership, incorrect or unbalanced reporting is quickly met with checks and balances, or even a scathing rebuke. If I put forward an unsound case, I’ll be dragged over the coals soon enough - having to reshape my views and restate my case. But that’s the aim - right? We live and learn.

[Link to the WSJ Op Ed., The Blog Mob  "Written by fools to be read by imbeciles." ]

This current Wikipedia situation essentially cast me in the role of a dour member of the main stream media and the Wikipedians in the roll of the blogger. This strikes me as deeply ironic, since the Wikipedians accosting me were deeply contemptuous of blogs and bloggers.

But what, after all, is Wikipedia but the world's biggest group blog?

A further interesting note: BoingBoing shares a letter from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to Rick Jeliffe who is at the center of the "Wikigate 07" (teehee) controversey:

I hope you will publicly reject [Mircrosoft's offer to edit Wikipedia for pay] as being unethical. Point out to [Microsoft] that people have been banned from Wikipedia permanently for doing what they are asking you to do. We consider it a grave violation of community trust, and Microsoft should be ashamed of themselves for asking.

My personal take is that the Microsoft controversey, in which Microsoft attempted to engage Jeliffe to corrrect errors in Wikipedia on their behalf, reflects more on problems with Wikipedia than with Microsoft; Wales's own attitudes promote the kind of bureaucratic paranoia and suspicion of expertise I experienced.

In Wales's utopia, all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. The elite of the WIkipedia editors, entrusted with special powers by Wales et al. act as a form of secret police—or if that seems too harsh a metphor, anti-bodies in the midst of a raging autoimmune disease—and, of course, the fighting is so vicious because the stakes are so low. 

Truth is not the point. The point is control.

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Appendix:

1. An interesting passage from a site devoted to the subject of "Trusted Metadata Distribution Using Social Networks."

   Submitted by stan on Fri, 2005-03-18 16:35.
   (From an email exchange with Dave Methvin, CTO of PC Pitstop)

   Boneheaded decision makers will ruin any useful results
   Here I'm relying on "the wikipedia effect." A study found that graffiti in Wikipedia remains there an average of only 5 minutes before it is corrected. Similarly, within my proposed system I'm hoping that boneheads will be quickly detected and marked as untrustworthy. So if the bonehead is (for example) 3 hops away, then I just need anyone within 2 hops of me to notice. (See Keeping your network clean.) And in a social network, there is additional social pressure that Wikipedia doesn't have: No one wants to be the guy that trusted the bonehead and messed things up for everyone downstream! (For example, imagine getting an email saying "Hey Dave, why is your friend Mary saying that Claria.com software is good stuff?!")

   What is being described here is essentially an immune system, but one highly prone to auto-immune disease processes in the form of extreme paranoia and excessive bureaucratic interference. Fascinating. The Hive Mind is no longer just a subject of science fiction. It's already here.

2. The comment section of this post by Jeremy Hunsinger explaining, in a nut shell, the problem with Wikipedia as a venue for biography in general. In answer to a question the encyclopedia britannica has biographies, or how else would we know about Sir Isaac Newton. Why pray tell should wikipedia not have them?:

   . . . it is not about the dead and gone jason, it is about the living and the injustice that wikipedia does to them. sure there are dead people which it does injustice to also, but really this critique arose out of their treatment of science fiction against the construction of ‘notability’ and ‘neutrality’ see for newton you have a few hundred years to establish ‘neutrality’ though you still get some promoters and detractors…. but for current biographies you don’t have anything like that, and they get deleted or turned into messy ego playgrounds.

3. Australian ex-journalist named Paul Montgomery who is heading up an Internet startup called Tinfinger, a "Human Search Engine" for hosting biographical profiles is pleased as punch that this issue has been raised. He has a modest proposal of his own: The business case for Google to nerf Wikipedia. He also makes reference to a post by Andy Beal, Campaign to Reduce Wikipedia’s PageRank to Zero. He heard about this whole fuss involving biographies via Dave Winer.


4. The Wikipedia Review topic on Editors makes fascinating reading. (registration required) From reading it, I learned that Wikipedia editors are not supposed to assume bad faith. A deeply paranoid assumption of bad faith combined with a don't you know who I am? attitude made for some very bad chemistry in my encounter with them. Hint to those who prefer pseudonymity: why no, I don't know who you are. Why should I?
   My favorite line from The Wikipedia Review (regarding my post) is I was wondering when someone else would realise the parallels between Wikipedia and "Animal Farm."


5. An interesting passage from Wikipedia Watch (a site which takes way too much interest in what various Wikipedians think about scientology):

   . . . most of the administrators at Wikipedia prefer to exercise their police functions anonymously. The process itself is open, but the identities of the administrators are usually cloaked behind a username and a Gmail address. (Gmail does not show an originating IP address in the email headers, which means that you cannot geolocate the originator, or even know whether one administrator is really a different person than another administrator.) If an admin has a political or personal agenda, he can do a fair amount of damage with the special editing tools available to him. The victim may not even find out that this is happening until it's too late. From Wikipedia, the material is spread like a virus by search engines and other scrapers, and the damage is amplified by orders of magnitude. There is no recourse for the victim, and no one can be held accountable. Once it's all over the web, no one has the power to put it back into the bottle.

   (By the way: here's how to unmask a gmail IP #: Get a subscription to ReadNotify.com and then correspond with your aggressor via email. ReadNotify even gives you a map for their IP address. A bit scary when you see it in operation for the first time)



6. From the comment section of this post comes this fascinating passage:

   Initially the article was deleted because [redacted], the administrator who created the stub on September 28, and I agreed to a speedy deletion, after we worked together on the piece for several days. That was my initial request when I first complained to [redacted] — either delete the whole thing or lose those two biased links on me. We finally agreed to this deletion when I discovered that she was previously biased against me, based on independent evidence going back months that had nothing to do with Google. She also refused in the end to relent on one of the two links. Jimmy Wales was made aware that we had deleted the article, but he declined to intervene. He did defend [redacted] as one of his best editors, and scolded me for reverting two links on Google-Watch, and restored them, and said, “Don’t do that again.” [redacted] warned me that she didn’t have the power to keep the article on me deleted if another administrator decided to resurrect it.

Issues with the editor in question are the  subject about half of The Wikipedia Review's editorial discussion boards. See also A Peek into the Mind of Wikipedia’s SlimVirgin and Veni, Vidi, Wiki?. Curiouser and curiouser. I'm tempted to go back to this post's original title: Though the Wikipedia Looking Glass, and What Kathryn Found There.



7. See also The Wikipedia-Watch Accountability Project.


8. An intelligent article from Brian Bergstein at the Associated Press: Why won't Wikipedia allow paid entries?

   The "free encyclopedia that anyone can edit'' requires articles to have a ``neutral point of view.'' But most contributors surely have some personal motivation to dive into a subject, whether it's adoration of "Star Trek'' or a soft spot for geraniums. What's to say contributors who get paid have a harder time sticking to the golden path of neutrality? And doesn't Wikipedia have a built-in defense mechanism -- the swarms of volunteer editors and moderators who can quickly obliterate public-relations fluff, vanity pages and other junk?

   To me the biggest irony of the Microsoft controversy is that the material that the Wikipeadians I talked to insisted was the only kind of material appropriate for sourcing was pretty much all written by people who were paid to write it. And edited by people who were paid to edit it.


9. See also Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism by Larry Sanger


10. Seth Finkestein sez My screen runneth over with Wikipedia punditry Post: Wikipedia - Debate with me, Bureaucratic system based on China, Secret police. Best passage:

    Note, from the standpoint of keeping Wikipedia running, power-tripping is a feature, not a bug. It's part of the draw, that YOU-YES-YOU, if you work hard enough for free, can be rewarded by the "authority" which comes from being able speak the secret spell of WP:WHAT_I_SAY_GOES, to those who would otherwise have social deference ("experts").

11. And then there is the corporate PR perspective on the Wikipedia problem. From Cyberalert.com, Getting PR in Wikipedia:

    In the September 11, 2006 entry in his blog Micro Persuasion, Steve Rubel of Edelman analyzes the Google results for Wikipedia articles about the top 100 U.S.-based advertisers. In most every case, the Wikipedia article on the company ranked in Google's top 20 results. Many of those Wikipedia articles contain negative information about the companies. Febreeze's Wikipedia entry (Currently #2 on Google) notes that the product may be harmful to household pets. Rubel believes that trying to police Wikepedia article content is asking for trouble. He advocates a "look but don't touch" position. William Comcowich of CyberAlert, the media monitoring company, maintains that, while copy manipulation and brand promotion is verboten, companies should absolutely not let inaccuracies stand in Wikepedia articles — and should employ light-handed, journalistic-type editing to correct factual errors. In handling negative charges, companies should let the charges remain in the article, but provide the "other side of the story". Clearly, what's in Wikipedia can affect corporate or brand reputation in a major way. PR professionals should review all pages in Wikipedia in which their company/clients are mentioned. If you want to make a change, use the Wikipedia Help pages to learn how to modify the article or place a new article.

    Light-handed? That's an interesting turn of phrase. What do we understand by that? Don't use your real name. Don't let anyone know your affiliations, dial in from home, not from the company network Essentially, the whole PR industry is being put in the position of learning how to be secret agents. This kind of deception will be is part of their jobs. Meanwhile, the WP admins use the very same tactics to act as enforcers—a strange dynamic in which everyone sheds their pre-Internet innocence bit by bit, and everyone gets to wear the hood, whether they really want to hide their faces or not. Internet pseudonymity become mandatory, the norm. As a strong advocate of being oneself on the Internet whenever possible, I find this trend deeply disturbing.


12. See also TrevBlog's really intelligent post Is Wikipedia controversial?:

    . . . currently, federal law protects sites from being held responsible for content provided by their users. (The individual users, if identified, can be held responsible, but since Wikipedia allows anonymity, this is unlikely to occur in future cases.) Now there's a controversy. Keep in mind that on a technical level, Wikipedia is just a sophisticated bulletin board system. Depending on the phrasing and interpretation of the law, it could just mean that all BBSes would have to display a prominent legal disclaimer explaining their fallible nature (Wikipedia's current disclaimers are hidden behind a link); if the law stated that no disclaimer would suffice, BBSes would have to start from scratch using onerous registration procedures to allow individual contributors to be identified. The definition of a BBS would extend to all wikis, discussion forums, and, possibly, chat rooms and webmail services.

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