Gloria and Wikipedia

I have never been a huge fan of Wikipedia.  I appreciate the theory of crowdsourcing of information, but the actual implementation leaves much to be desired.  There is, for example, the entry on computer viruses.  It is riddled with errors.  At one point the first paragraph contained more than one factual error per sentence.  As an expert in the field, I did try to correct the errors, only to find that some zealous nut bar in the Wikipedia community would immediately revert my corrections to the error-ridden state.

Somebody did once create a Wikipedia page for me, and it has been oddly useful.  Once, when I was sent out to do a seminar (and was not told that the agency putting on the seminar had already complained about unqualified instructors coming to do the seminars), I contacted the venue beforehand, and got a very cold reception.  I got on the plane, got off the plane and got to the venue.  The reception that I received when I actually got there was considerably different.  The person I had talked to had done a Google search on me, and found my page on Wikipedia.  Simply the fact that there *was* a page on Wikipedia on me changed his attitude completely.  (In a slightly less job related situation, the fellow classmates of my grandchildren always found it the most impressive thing about me: I had a page on Wikipedia.)

The page on Wikipedia originally mentioned Gloria, and the fact that she had a edited all of my books.  When Gloria died, I actually went to the page, and updated it, to reflect the fact that she had died, and that that might have an impact on my ability to write more books, and pointed at her obituary, which also mentioned the fact.  That stayed in place for approximately a month.  But, at some point, some zealous Wikipedia official noted that the obituary was entered on my blog.  Since I had made the edit, and the source material on the Web was an entry on a blog that I controlled, Wikipedia decided that this was self-promotion, and removed every and all mentions of Gloria from my Wikipedia page.  Since this was only a month or so after Gloria died, and I was still in the most intense stages of grief, I found this, personally, incredibly hurtful.  It did not improve my opinion of Wikipedia overall.  Ceterum censeo Wikipedia delendam esse.  Wikipedia may be helpful for unimportant sources of unimportant information, but for any significant information you had better have other sources.  Wikipedia is a source of entertainment at best.