Gadgetopia

John Byrne VS Wikipedia: John Bryne is apparently a cartoonist of some kind (here’s his Wikipedia page, which makes the post recursive). Anyway, he got uptight with Wikipedia the other day.

[Bryne’s page was ] originally an informative retrospective of his entire career, detailing not only the work he’s done throughout the years, but the documented fan and industry response to his various projects, Byrne discovered it the other week and immediately set about to “correct” things.

Here’s the problem. Byrne didn’t just want to go through to clarify points or streamline the entry — he wanted to dismantle the entire page. He deleted everything except for the opening biographical paragraph and the bibliography. He deleted every bit of information regarding his career stages, his interactions with fans, pros, etc., claiming that the entire entry was fraught with inaccuracies and lies.

The page itself has been cut down considerably and locked (supposedly by Jimmy Wales himself), so it looks like Byrne wins. The discussion page is great reading.

If you like this sort of thing, check out our prior posts on Wikipedia geekfights (I can’t find this post — if anymore remembers it, comment with a link), Wikipedia VFDs, and the John Kerry page.

There are some interesting comments about this situation in the Metafilter thread from which I found this item. Many people are critical of Wikipedia in this instance:

Put a fork in Wikipedia. The experiment has failed. […] At the end of the day, there needs to be a final judge or authority. […] Just pull his file if he has such a problem with the internet […] They should have just deleted the entry on him entirely.