Dear Wikipedia,"An Open Letter to Wikipedia." By Philip Roth, The New Yorker, 9/6/12.I am Philip Roth. I had reason recently to read for the first time the Wikipedia entry discussing my novel “The Human Stain.” The entry contains a serious misstatement that I would like to ask to have removed. This item entered Wikipedia not from the world of truthfulness but from the babble of literary gossip—there is no truth in it at all.
Yet when, through an official interlocutor, I recently petitioned Wikipedia to delete this misstatement, along with two others, my interlocutor was told by the “English Wikipedia Administrator”—in a letter dated August 25th and addressed to my interlocutor—that I, Roth, was not a credible source: “I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work,” writes the Wikipedia Administrator—“but we require secondary sources.”
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
Philip Roth learns about to Wikipedia.
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4 comments:
OF COURSE HE’S NOT CREDIBLE. Because you say so. He’s only the source author who got paid for the work. He’s not some irrelevant, partisian, 4th rate hacker in Hackensack to tell us it was actually Alfred E Newman.
There!
It is to laugh. :-)
Wikipedia needs replacing. It's infested with SJW's and other petty tyrants acting as gatekeepers to keep information out.
Wikipedia lacks the rigorous editing of the En. Brit. but is useful on more neutral topics. There should be a feature that allows for editing wars to be settled with different contested versions labeled as such. Even the En. Brit. isn't without its biases, I assume. Caveat emptor I suppose is the best guidance.
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