Some time ago a few of my students emailed me (from a bar somewhere I believe) to alert me to the fact that I had a Wikipedia biography page. I had known this already because one of the site administrators had emailed me for a photo. I never though much of it, but my students seemed to think it was cool (or maybe they were laughing at me, it is sometimes hard to tell;-).


It has recently come to my attention that over the past few months some folks are engaged in a minor skirmish over my biography, something I assume is fairly common on biographies, and elsewhere in Wikipedia (Politicization of knowledge? Go figure). It appears that some anonymous people are using the biography to try to paint me as a . . . Republican (cue breaking glass!;-). (Perhaps they are some of the less thoughtful Grist readers, as opposed to most who comment there, where character assassination in mainline posts appears to be accepted behavior.)

First, let’s state for the record that such insinuations are simply wrong. I suppose they are advanced by the disingenuous for the benefit of a small set of cognitive misers for whom such labels are useful shortcuts that help to avoid actually engaging in the substance of my academic policy work. Apparently some feel threatened enough by my work enough to try to influence how I am publicly perceived. To get a sense of the sort of juvenile editorial changes taking place over there, one recent edit removed references to liberal-leaning groups who had favorably cited my work.

I typically don’t pay much attention to such things because the folks who care only about assigning political labels in litmus-test fashion are probably not the ones who are going to be too interested in policy analyses anyway. After all, why spend the time understanding nuances of a complex topic when a pejorative political label is available as a convenient mental shortcut? We saw some of this from the rabid right in the (mostly deleted) comments here on my recent post about Al Gore.

I have also recently learned that Wikipedia frowns upon an individual editing their own biography, which seems fair, so rather than seek to create a more accurate page myself, I have decided to ask Prometheus readers if this is an issue I should even be concerned about, and if so, what to do about it.

I don’t have much quibble about the details of the specific facts presented in the current entry. But the facts selected for highlighting do cherry pick one of literally hundreds of media appearances (i.e., Fox News) and one of hundreds of articles (i.e, Regulation), I suppose the selectivity is to make the point that I have at times interacted with people on the political right. (Shock! Horror!) For the record, I was happy to accept an interview with Fox News (as I do with most all requests from the media) as their viewers (in my opinion) would benefit from hearing about the stuff we do, just like CNN viewers (for whom I have also appeared). And I also happily accepted an invitation to rework one of my peer-reviewed articles for Regulation (published by the libertarian Cato Institute) as their readers (in my opinion) would also benefit from hearing about the stuff we do, just like The New Republic readers (for whom I’ve also published).

To be absolutely clear, as a policy scholar I am happy to have people from any political persuasion show in interest in our work, and I’ll continue to write for and speak with people who are interested that come from a range of perspectives — Democrat, Green, Libertarian, Republican, Socialist, Labour, Liberal Democrat, Conservative, etc. etc.. I won’t give in to efforts to intimidate by casting perjorative political labels. Ideally, members of all of these political parties will see the inescapable wisdom is our work, though I won’t hold my breath;-) And for the most part I’ll also continue to ignore the more inane criticisms.

So my question, Prometheus readers, is: should I care about the Wikipedia biography?