A Guest Blog for the Leiter Report

This morning I found, to my surprise, that Brian Leiter had invited me to write a guest blog for him on “Tips for Writing Your own Wikipedia Entry.” I love a good joke, even an  April Fool’s one like this.  But now the joke is on him — because if anyone has expertise on writing one’s entry, it’s him.

I’ll get to that; but first, let me address the nasty insinuation that I wrote the Wikipedia entry on Noëlle McAfee. Now all one needs to do to see if this is so is to go to the history tab of the entry and see who created it.  If you do so, you’ll find that someone named Kevin Gorman wrote the entry:

This and the following eight entries are by Kevin Gorman, who I’ve since discovered is a high-level Wikipedia editor in California. The day after the entry was created, there were several minor edits by a chrisclaire88, a pseudonym for an editor who has started pages on other women philosophers.  For the sake of argument, what if I am chrisclaire88?  If that is the case, then that would have been in bad form and readers might wonder if the entry is biased. To check, readers could go through the boring changes that chrisclaire88 made and decide for themselves. If chrisclaire88 were indeed my pseudonym and I had used it to guard the entry, reversed things that made me look bad, and been an all around nasty and vile person, there would be cause for concern.  But chrisclaire88 was instead a tedious editor making trivial changes. And she seems to have moved on to other ventures.

Before turning to the edits that Brian Leiter made to the Wikipedia entry on him — and there are many! — let me offer my tips.

Tip number 1: Don’t write an entry on yourself.

Tip number 2: Don’t edit an entry on yourself.

Tip number 3: If you want to edit an entry anywhere on Wikipedia, start an account so you are accountable, otherwise you’ll be identified by your IP address.

Tip number 4: Don’t guard the entry on yourself and remove things that make you look bad.

Tip number 5: Be aware that an entry on you is not your entry. It belongs to the wikiuniverse. There are guidelines on entries on living persons. Follow those. If you think someone else has violated them, report the matter to wikipedia.

Tip number 6: Don’t accuse anyone who has edited the entry on you in a way you don’t like as “vandalizing” the entry. That just makes you look like an idiot for (1) thinking the entry is “your” entry and (2) being so clueless about how wikis work.

In keeping with those tips as well as the guidelines on entries on living persons, the most egregious thing to do is guard your own entry and remove things that make you look bad. Let’s say someone else finds that a reference in the entry has been removed, say to an old Boston Globe article that said, basically, you’re a schmuck, and then this person puts it back in the entry. Don’t remove it. Again, this is not your promo piece; the entry should be well-sourced and balanced. And, yes, the Boston Globe counts as a good source.

For example, from IP addresses that Brian Leiter has used (click on the “diff” button to see a comparison of the previous entry and the subsequent edit made by this IP address):

50.158.111.229:

128.135.240.117:

Here are other changes that were made to the entry on Brian Leiter from IP addresses that Brian Leiter has used to comment on my blog,

70.112.29.7:

128.83.152.213:

I also believe that Brian Leiter has used IP address 70.112.222.175 while he was still in Texas. Here are the results I get for this one:

70.112.222.175 on Brian Leiter (4.71% of the total edits made to the page)

Next 500 results →

 Enough said.
Update 4/2/16: The day after I posted this, Brian Leiter doubled- down on his lies and insinuations. Just to be clear, on the matter of NM’s entry on Wikipedia, Chrisclaire88’s edits amount to only 4% of the entire entry (408 of 9,370 bytes), and the record is open for all to see that there was nothing akin to BL’s defensive edits that reversed anything that was negative about him. So whether I am Chrisclaire88 hardly matters. Of course, there hasn’t been any negative edits to NM’s Wikipedia entry, namely because NM is not a controversial figure. Him pointing back to NM obfuscates the issue: that BL was self-serving in protecting his entry from any legitimate criticism. BL claims that he may have edited his own entry 4 times out of 1,000; but the above account shows this to be patently false.  I’d be happy to share screen shots with his IP addresses just to back things up. In any case, now BL is calling NM names, which he seems to think is quite clever but which NM sees as pure desperation. As of this writing 2 days after posting this entry, this post has been viewed about 2,000 times and I trust that most of my readers can read quite well.

By Noelle McAfee

I am professor of philosophy at Emory University and editor of the Kettering Review. My latest book, Fear of Breakdown: Politics and Psychoanalysis, explores what is behind the upsurge of virulent nationalism and intransigent politics across the world today. My other writings include Democracy and the Political Unconscious; Habermas, Kristeva, and Citizenship; Julia Kristeva; and numerous articles and book chapters. Edited volumes include Standing with the Public: the Humanities and Democratic Practice and a special issue of the philosophy journal Hypatia on feminist engagements in democratic theory. I am also the author of the entry on feminist political philosophy in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and well into my next book project on democratic public life.

3 comments

  1. I feel that the best description of Leiter’s self-wiki’ing habits came from Paul Campos who turned the phrase autobiographical onanism…

    “It’s also telling that Leiter, whose usual rhetorical strategy could be described as Maximum Frontal Assault, especially when it comes to any criticisms of the “the most powerful man in academic philosophy” (this description is from Leiter’s wiki page, which aspiring Philosophers on the Make could use as veritable template for their own experiments in autobiographical onanism), buried his “denial” in an update of a nearly week-old post on his blog, instead of giving his refutation of the supposed libels against him the publicity which one would suppose the most powerful man in academic philosophy would want them to have.

  3. The self-aggrandizing are invigorated by our making such a fuss. Do what they fear the most; stop paying attention.

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