Cities and suburbs, real and imaginary.

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Something I don't have...

Did you know that I have no entry at all in Wikipedia?

I checked in again recently, and still do not have even the slightest mention of disambiguation on the THE LAST DRAGON page, for that schlocktastic 80s blaxploitation film. With my next novel, MAZE, I would hope that the entry for "Maze" in Wikipedia would have some mention in the further reading section.

It's like discovering that your little planet has no entry in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and that even if one were to put one in, the moderators of said Guide would quash it like a bug, because we who live on this planet cannot be allowed to validate it on our own.

I think it is also interesting that when I looked up the IAFA Crawford Prize, Daryl Gregory has no wikipedia entry, even though he won the prize, and has published in major sf-nal mags. Ambergris is never referenced as a city in a major work of fantasy, and etc. Under the Locus Award for Best First Novel, most of the award-winning books are "red", meaning there is no entry for them.

Bas-Lag is known to Wiki, as a city and not only underneath an author and some books.

Where is the strange, missing line between the people and ideas that enter the zeitgeist in Wikipedia land, and the people and ideas that do not?

There doesn't seem to be rhyme or reason behind who has an entry and who does not. Not that that's a bad thing, just that it's a strange thing.

2 comments:

LisaBit said...

Hmph! I am deeply offended that you don't have a wikipedia article - Last Dragon is so ripe for a deep investigation of places and people and timelines. Now I could just channel my moral outrage into creating a wikipedia editor account and adding it, in my copious (not copious) free time...

J m mcdermott said...

I would love to see one! Also Daryl Gregory deserves one, too, as do so many other authors and worlds of literature.