A Question of Identity
Over the weekend, I reworked meyerweb’s sidebar a bit. One of the changes is the addition of a section called “Identity Archipelago“, which links to various bit of my online identity and makes use of XFN’s me value. I’ve been meaning to do this ever since co-presenting a poster on how me could be used to accomplish identity consolidation, and hey, I’m only thirty months late.
I ran into an interesting dilemma as I assembled the links, though. Should I link to the Wikipedia entry about me, and if so, does it really merit a me marker? I’m not so sure. Yes, the page is about me, but it isn’t something I created, nor is it something I control. Thanks to the open nature of Wikipedia, it could be altered to state that I’m a paste-eating pederast with pretensions to the Pakistani presidency. It would be kind of embarrassing to link to something like that, let alone proclaim in a machine-parseable way that the information on the other side of the link represented me in some way.
While I’ve never stated a Wikipedia policy, as others have, I’ve privately maintained a hands-off policy. Even though I’d like to replace the picture with a better one and flesh out some details of my career, and on occasion have wanted to correct some inaccuracies, I’ve refrained from doing so. I’m not going to proclaim that I’ll never ever edit my own entry, because if libel (alliterative or otherwise) shows up and I’m the first to notice, I’ll at least roll the page back. But in general, I’m keeping my hands off.
Nevertheless, it is arguably a piece of my online identity. Not linking to it feels like a glaring omission—or am I just trying to rationalize an egocentric desire to show off? I don’t think that I am, but then I’m hardly a neutral party.
So what’s your perspective? Is a Wikipedia entry created and edited by others properly a part of my archipelago, or is it simply a nearby island?
