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The biography of George Costanza is five times as long as that of Tim O’Reilly. As Wikipedia matures, there are hard decisions to be made about depth and breadth. Shouldn’t Tim’s entry be many pages long? He’s one of the great thinkers of our time.
Only a marketing guru like Seth Godin - whose livelihood depends on maximising the amount of words written about themselves - could think that the importance of an individual is measured by the amount of words written about them on Wikipedia, or conversely that Wikipedia is a reflection of anything more than the sort of people who contribute to Wikipedia. The real Tim O’Reilly is probably quite happy that his life hasn’t been exposed to the sort of scrutiny suffered by the fictional George Costanza; and who says that George Costanza isn’t one of the great thinkers of our time?
Tags: George Costanza, Seth Godin, Tim O'Reilly
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July 17, 2008 at 5:09 pm
Seth Godin
Not sure I got the point of your post. First, my livelihood really has very little to do with how long my wikipedia entry is. More important, though, is my original point–making Wikipedia trivial doesn’t necessarily make it better. Tim has written some brilliant stuff, world-changing stuff. But you wouldn’t know it from checking Wikipedia. That’s because they have policies that reward the trivial.
I think we’ve got plenty of trivia. What we need is more of the good stuff.
July 17, 2008 at 10:41 pm
Paul Currion
Hi Seth, thanks for dropping by. Love your work, btw.
The question “Shouldn’t Tim’s entry be many pages long?” implies that you believe that somebody’s importance should be reflected in how many pages long their entry on Wikipedia is. My first question is, why do you believe that?
I think Tim is more important than George as well, but how credible is it for us to claim that he’s written some world-changing stuff when the vast majority of people in that world don’t even know who he is?