Notability
Posted 19 April 10 by Scott AndrewsApparently my Wikipedia listing may not meet the level of acceptable notability. I am not notable enough. Harrumph.
As a matter or principle, I don’t update my own Wikipedia page. I know authors who do, and I’m in no way dissing them for it, but somehow I’d feel, I dunno, tacky if I did it myself.
(Of course, this post demonstrates that I do, occasionally, check it. But not often. Not nearly as often as my Amazon sales rankings. What? I’m an insecure author, what else do you think we do when we spend all day sitting at our keyboards… write?)
So in order to prevent me being deleted or even, gasp, merged with another article – the wikipedia version of a forced marriage (and who, I wonder, would they merge me with? I mean, if it was Kristen Bell I don’t think I’d mind, but if it were that Guerrier fellow, I’d be appalled!) I’m putting out a call for readers of this blog to go and update the page so that I become more, um, notable.
Only one condition: you must never have actually met me. This precludes me basically press ganging friends to do it as proxies, which is still tacky, I reckon.
I wonder, will anyone take up the challenge!?
Go on, you know you want to.
In the meantime, Children’s Crusade should go to press this week, my three Big Finish Highlander plays have been approved by the licence holder, so that production process should now kick into high gear (hurrah!) and I’m circling my screenplay suspiciously, sizing it up and preparing myself to move in for the kill.
Also: how much does Matt Smith OWN the Doctor? How bereft am I at having watched the final episode of Veronica Mars (NOOOOOOO!) And how much am I looking forward to seeing Sue Sylvester strike a pose?
Answer: Lots.
Comment
- What the wiki page says, in brief: this bloke writes. He is the son of this bloke who sings. These are the published books/plays he’s written.
What you must do is provide a list of sound-bites, one line updates of new information that can be dropped onto the page at intervals. Suggest the following (bearing in mind the golden rule of a good anecdote: a good story is often better than the truth):
– He was the only member of a pub football team that toured Czechoslovakia who could spell the name of the host nation.
– He is rumoured to have grown a root vegetable in an old slipper that resembled the likeness of Nelson Mandela. The item has reportedly been sold on ebay.
– While still a student, his big break nearly came when he was offered the part of an in-patient on the BBC medical drama Casualty, but was forced to decline for fear that his skillful portrayal of a gonorrhea sufferer would cripple his sex life before it began.
Then you will attract a swarm of wiki-types who will flock to your page to edit it by adding [citation needed] all over the place, which is as good as a red rag to a bull suffering from cataracts in that it drives other wiki-types to obsessively search for sources that confirm or deny these claims. Notability problem solved.
— Mike Apr 20, 10:45pm #
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