I’m not super-involved in the Wikipedia editorial community, but I dabble. I’ve got an account, and I generally try to be fair and balanced about the OXM page. You would think editing it would be a conflict of interest, but I have never hidden my involvement, I’ve never violated the Wikipedia rules about neutrality, and I’ve never deleted anything that wasn’t outright false (like the rumor that one of our interns died). In fact I’ve added links to discussions where people allege that the magazine is biased, because the entry regarding those allegations said “citation needed” for about six months and nobody bothered to prove those claims. So, there you go, that’s what “they” are saying.
Over the holidays, I made a page for Andy Eddy and was thrilled when it was not deleted, simply because that meant I did something right when I built it. Wikipedia is very finicky about its citations; it’s not a fan club, it’s got to be verifiable information and preferably neutral in tone, like a standard print encyclopedia would be. I tried to follow the format correctly and tried to present information about Andy that suggested why he should be noted alongside other game journos on Wikipedia like Jeff Gertsmann and Dean Takahashi (who has done much more than his Wiki entry suggests). For instance, Shane Bettenhausen is well known and certainly deserves the entry, but whoever did his page didn’t cite any sources for him, so a Wikipedia editor tagged it as unverified and potentially removable.
I know Wikipedia is for people who are actually important and that other people can prove are important. It’s also a key battleground for nerds to discuss the minutia of fictional characters (Charlie Barratt from GamesRadar proved just what serious business it is). But still, my ego has always thought having an entry would be cool someday.
So while I was tweaking the OXM page last week, I clicked on my name just to see, and lo and behold, podcast listener SquishyDog2 apparently made a Dan Amrich entry. It doesn’t have all the things that long-lasting Wiki entries have, like proper citations or categories or for that matter a reason to exist. But it’s there. And that made my ego smile.
So since it will probably disappear in a matter of moments, I wanted to say “Cool! Look at that!” while it existed.