Paul Staines AKA Guido Fawkes has admitted to editing his own wikipedia entry.
Whether editing your own Wikipedia entry is A Bad Thing or neither here nor there depends on who you are and what edits you are making.
What is A Bad Thing is bullshitting about why you’re editing your little claim to fame.
Paul Staines has been, so he says, long been invited to edit his own entry by the editors. So that’s ok then.
But really? Did Staines really get an email asking for help. I wonder how it went…
Dear Mr Fawkes,
Your entry in Wikipedia is in such a mess and so full of inaccuracies that it really needs a good tidy up.Seeing as it is in such a mess, and it is about you and you’re soooooo important and brilliant in all walks of life, from journalism to high finance, would you do us the honour of gracing our webpage and having a clear out. We just know you’ll do a sterling job at keeping it impartial, too.
Please? Pretty please?
Your loyal subjects,
The Editors
I do wonder how many other people have edited their own entry though, at the invitation of ‘the editors’.
Wikipedia isn’t just a free-for-all. It has some guidelines, as you’d expect.
Take this one for instance…
Dealing with edits by the subject of the article
Subjects sometimes become involved in editing material about themselves, either directly or through a representative. The Arbitration Committee has ruled in favor of showing leniency to BLP subjects who try to fix what they see as errors or unfair material. Although Wikipedia discourages people from writing about themselves
Small edits by the subject of an article may be over-looked, but the key phrase “Wikipedia discourages people from writing about themselves” certainly doesn’t sound like they offer invitations like the one Staines claims he got, especially to people that in the scheme of things, aren’t very big, famous or significant in any way.
