What I didn’t find on Wikipedia today.

he is well known for alway wearing a jacket and having a toothbrush hanging out of his pocket.

That made my day.

Any more names of the missing?

Mine. And my dad’s. Heck, my whole family’s entryless. What’s wrong with these people? Don’t they know the Internet is for egosurfing?

Dan — yes, that was sort of the point (about my entry, not my dad’s, who unlike me and, I presume, you has actually done things that are worth noting).

Harry–I guess those last two words sum it all up. On Wikipedia, as in many other places, “worth noting” is synonymous with, “successful at acquiring a fan base”. By that definition, then, your accomplishments here on this blog far outweigh your dad’s, just as those of a third-rate ballplayer with a brief stint in the major leagues, or an obscure actor who accidentally landed a bit part in a cult film, or the perpetrator of a tabloid-worthily lurid crime, far outweigh those of even the most high-achieving scientists and engineers in unglamorous/non-technogeeky fields, not to mention highly successful businesspeople and entrepreneurs, locally important politicians, and of course high-ranking civil servants.

Perhaps if your dad had gotten involved in a scandal or something…

Tom — yes, I’ve thought of that and at some point I’ll write the one on Clegg (if no-one else does) and perhaps beef up the Otto Clarke entry. But I can’t rebalance the whole bloody thing — I guess I’m asking other people to consider the balance (and, I guess, to internalise the criticism implicit in Dan Simon’s comments).

I’m struck by the lack of an article on Joe Rauh, an important Cold War liberal Democrat.

Skeletor: more important than all y’all.

Are Kotsko and Holbo immediate, recent, or eventual? They themselves are the very persons best equipped to answer these questions!

Or you could get your dad to join a blog. Maybe he could give occasional video comments if he won’t type? Or maybe he could find someone to transcribe remarks. If all the (nonrelated) people who know about his work are teachers, well, they’ll never have time to deal with wikipedia. He needs some slacker-fans like you have :)

I’ve undermined your post by creating a stub entry for your dad. There’s a nice piece about him in the Guardian, which others could use to expand the article. I’ve linked it.

I’m part of Tim Brighouse’s fanbase.

In case Dan Simon hasn’t got round to using the Google, and since Harry’s being a bit coy, the ‘scandal’ was that when he was Chief Education Officer for the British County of Oxfordshire, he sued the then Education secretary John Patten for saying of him in a speech to the Conservative party conference that education in Britain would always have problems ‘as long as we have nutters like Tim Brighouse hanging around and frightening the kids'(or words to that effect. But I’m fairly sure that the use of the word ‘nutter’ turned out to be legally significant). He won.

This will now no doubt derail the thread into a discussion of the American First Amendment vs British libel laws. Which is probably why Harry was being coy, on reflection. I on the other hand am teaching a course on ‘On Liberty’ this afternoon, and will find it useful preparation.

I’m a Wikipedian myself, but it always annoys the fuck out of me when somebody finds a real problem with it and is than answered in the vein of #3 and #13. Especially when, as is the case here, the problem is far bigger than any single contributor can fix.

That said, the problem Harry signals is not unique to Wikipedia, but is a general internet problem. I’ve myself noticed it when looking for book reviews; reviews of books published before the mid-nineties are much rarer, especially when these are not books that have stayed in print.

With Wikipedia, the tendency is often to look for verification and noticability soley online, which again handicaps those people whose achievements happened before hand and are not so wellknown as to have a following online.

One thing I’ve noticed is that the wikipedia articles on the 2004 presidential election, for instance, are astonishingly detailed, giving every detail you could possibly want.

The articles on the 1984 election don’t even give you more than the most basic summary of the primary campaign, basically stuff I knew already.

Look, just write it. Signed, response #3.

You alone can’t solve the problems with Wikipedia any more than you alone can solve the problems of, say, American sugar policy. However, when I saw that Wikipedia had no article on Shifty Henry (name-checked in Elvis’s “Jailhouse Rock”), I solved the problem of no Shifty Henry entry.

On the other hand, after 6000 or so contributions, many of them now labelled unsubstantiated, or eviscerated and deracinated by subsequent contributors, etc., my Wikipedia problem is that I just don’t have the stomach for it any more, much more fun in pioneer times, etc. . . .

The problem is, if a wikipedian decides he hasn’t read it or heard it on TV then they’ll automatically delete, who wants to bet that when you do create articles on all those individuals some ignorant wikipedian will call for a snap deletion based on non-notable because they couldn’t find anything on one google search (because that is the type of brilliant, indepth research conducted by a lot of wikipedians who go around deleting articles).