Fowler Jones wrote me to ask…
Hi Mark, Here's a question for you and forgive me if you already answered it – Do you ever contribute (edit) Wikipedia or other crowd sourced online compendiums? If not, is it a question of time, a question of standards or something else?
I did for a while but I gave it up. Either I forgot how to do that or they changed the software and I couldn't figure out how to enter corrections. Since then, I've occasionally asked someone else to that for me…but most of the time, I just let it (whatever "it" is) go.
I submitted a few corrections on topics where I felt I had some authority and too often wound up on some discussion page arguing with someone who thought he knew my work better than I did.
And I'll tell you another problem I had: I was friends with a well-known but older comedian. He didn't understand just about anything about how the Internet — which for some unknown reason, I always capitalize — worked. He called me once, very upset about some bogus (according to him) "info" that had been posted on his Wikipedia page.
I went to Wikipedia, edited out the lines in question and that was that……except that by so doing, I had instilled in him the idea that I could get anything he didn't like off any page on the World Wide Web. Which of course, no one can do. Heck, I sometimes even have trouble editing this blog. But he kept calling and calling…
