In another thread, the subject of male singers with girly voices was being discussed and I looked up the Wiki article for “Mr. Big,” who had a big hit in the early 90s. The article starts out:
“Mr. Big is an internationally-acclaimed super-group that forged its place in rock history during the early 90s.”
Um… they are? I remember the one hit song, and “internationall acclaimed super-group” is the sort of thing I’d reserve for, well… bands other than Mr. Big. Anyway, the article continues on just like that.
This guy’s bio includes two paragraphs on his high school and college debate victories. I can’t imagine more than one person would care enough to include it.
In the Netherlands, about three years ago, we had a bit of a scandal involving a wikipedia entry and a member of the Dutch Royal Family. A young Dutch woman, married one of the Princes, turned out to have a bit of a scandalous past. She may or may not have been the lover of a known Dutch drug kingpin. However, the Wikipedia entry about herturned out to have been altered, a bit too favouredly, from a PC originating in the Royal Palace. The press got on it, just as they had chased the story about the drug lord, and indeed, our Princess Mabel was the one who had tried to change the entry.
I worked for a gentleman once who was famous enough to merit his own wiki entry. The entry was frankly appaling, they got basic details, (birthdate, wifes name) wrong. One rather slow day in the office a couple of collegues and I went to the entry and decided, what the hell lets fix it. So we did and got a bit of biographical information from the man himself, and uploaded a picture from our computer.
We were pretty neutral or tried to be. Were we wrong in what we did?
AK84 - It’s a grey area… you were being paid by the gentleman in question, which pushes it past “NPOV”, even if you had the best of intentions.
In any case, there’s nothing stopping casual users from editing the article to remove exaggerated claims and to return it back to a Neutral Point-of-view, especially now if you no longer work for him.
In any case, it’s not like it’s against the law, and you’d only raise the ire of a couple Wikipedia editors, whose opinions you don’t have to listen to
It’s a violation of Wikipedia policy. You’re not supposed to write about yourself. And by getting the biographical info directly from him, you’re violating the rule against original research.
Another reason not to do it is that it might be embarrassing if someone traces the edits back to the computers in your employer’s office (as in the example Maastricht mentioned about the Dutch royal family).
No, a great number of wiki articles exist because people close to the subject made them exist. It’s perfectly natural. A lot of companies write their own entries.
I don’t work for him anymore, but am on good terms with the old place. To be fair, we did not add anything he did not do, he really had done all we wrote and we used references. The article is much better now then it was then (even after our repair job).
My mother, my daughter, and I all went to the same high school. My mother and I even had the same gym teacher, although when I had her she was pretty darned ancient, let me tell you.
A few years ago, I was browsing through the website of the MIT Media Lab, where they have bios for all of the professors. The CV for one of them mentioned that he was a National Merit Scholarship winner. Now this guy was a full professor at MIT and doing research at the Media Lab, yet he still felt it necessary to mention this high school award.
Can this be true in some bizarre academic sense? If you are writing some article about a living person, and you interview that person, is the information they give you NOT considered original research? How more original can it get?
I’m no Wikipedia expert, but the problem is that the content needs to be verifiable by other editors. No one else could possibly verify what one claims to have been told directly by the source. I think that Wikipedia is especially sensitive about living persons because they don’t want to get sued for defamation.
While I agree that the article has a superfan bias to it, Mr. Big was “an internationally acclaimed supergroup” in the late 80s and early 90s.
See Supergroup
Also outside the US, they were very successful in Canada, the UK, Japan, and others, hence the “international acclaim”.
It’s unfortunate that they are remembered for that cheesy song since that wasn’t really their sound. They were alot heavier and faster. Believe me, all us guitar players were studying Paul Gilbert and his guitar shredding technique along with the bass players copying Billy Sheehan.
I guess you could say that they forged a place in rock history but the size of that place is really the question isn’t it?:dubious:
