Biographicon: crowd-sourcing non-notables
April 1, 2008 8:35 PM   Subscribe

 
this is an idea I've had many times, but never pulled the trigger. Ultimately it would seem that the non-notabilty, which is basically what differentiates the idea from wikipedia bios, is also a magnet for spam, the worst type of self-promoters, etc. but I hope someone's able to do it.
posted by cell divide at 8:48 PM on April 1, 2008


Well, mine seems pretty accurate. The advantage of writing your own, I suppose.
posted by Astro Zombie at 9:52 PM on April 1, 2008


Wikibios has been around a while already. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion sometimes suggests that persistent self-promoters try it, but I don't think they generally do. (For similar sites, Google suggests Blogger ....)
posted by dhartung at 10:02 PM on April 1, 2008


I wonder how they plan to handle conflicts? I know that there's at least one other person in the same city as me with the same (not terribly common) name. I wonder if we'll see multiple people lumped together into some sort of Frankensteined composite, a lurching, multi-lived wiki chimera.

That would actually be way cool.
posted by phooky at 10:45 PM on April 1, 2008 [1 favorite]


this is cool, and I am tempted to write my own. wikiBios looks good too, but it's pretty bizarre that they forbid people to write their own, and intstead suggest you have friends and family do it.

While it would be amusing to see a composite bio of me written by my friends, I don't think it would have more than a tenuous relationship to reality. For example, I think most of them could name the city I was born on, maybe 10% could guess the year, and zero would know the names of any of the schools I went to.

It would be interesting to see the biases based on point of view, like people I work with who have no clue about 90% of my life and would be forced to focus on programming languages and what kind of granola bars I like.

of course, they could interview me, at which point we come back to me just writing it myself.
posted by drjimmy11 at 11:20 PM on April 1, 2008


Hm. I must have done a good job with my bio. It's now on the front page.
posted by Astro Zombie at 10:12 AM on April 3, 2008


Wow, you're right above Rick Astley!
posted by Locative at 5:37 AM on April 5, 2008


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