Vanity Press

"In the areas of computer programming and open source, as well as astronomy and ornithology, many amateurs make very meaningful contributions equivalent to or exceeding those of the professionals. To many, description as an amateur is losing its negative meaning, and actually carries a badge of honor."

This is part of the definition of amateur on Wikipedia.com which was written by these so called "honorable/noble" amateurs.

Keen, a few paragraphs down, then reported, "In the July 2006 issue of The New Yorker, Stacy Schiff wrote, 'Wikipedia may be the world's largest most ambitious vanity press.'"

Vanity is self-love. It can also mean pride, arrogance, and cockiness. What I got from reading that part of Keene's chapter is that these Wikipedians love to love themselves. And why do they love themselves? Because writing and editing on Wikipedia makes them "experts" on common knowledge. It seemed like Keene was trying to say that Wikipedians think themselves better than the experts who actually write books, articles, etc.

To me, that says vanity. There's definitely a swagger in the step of lifetime commitment "blood-bros" bond that some people make to the website. Obviously we're only reading from one point of view, Keene's, but I think he is making a very valuable point in our authorship crisis topic.

Here's an example of how the article can change...

Wikipedia has been recently dealing with 'fake' vanity problems, the people who register themselves as ivy league college graduates when really they're high school drop outs with maybe a GED. If that's not vanity, I'm not sure what is.

These people are saying, "hey look I'm so smart and professional and smart and professional... wait did I already say that?" which is buffing up their ego on the web. It may not do much for them in the real world, but it doesn't seem like hard core Wikipedians really stay much in the real world. So people pretend to be these amazing experts (amateurs as they like calling themselves which Keene thinks that, between the lines, that really means expert in their book) and all the creator of Wikipedia, Wales, has to say is, "I regard it as a pseudonym and I don't really have a problem with it,". But it's a pseudonym that is giving people credit for something they never accomplished. It is bolstering their heads with juicy pride of their own work, when really it is all an act.


So do you think Wikipedia is a vanity press? I do. Vanity press because it is a scandalous article making machine monster with thousands of prideful web 2.0 slaves rowing the oars thievery on a sea of lies (sorry for the very bad cliche) or maybe a sea of common -on occasion or unknown- plagiarized knowledge. I said thievery because this whole subject does have to do with authorship and who would know if "Essjay" the Harvard graduate theology professor/young adult high school graduate just took a few lines from an article here, a few lines from a book there, to edit his thousands of Wikipedia articles. Who would know? You wouldn't, I wouldn't, Wikipedia wouldn't.



Yes, Wikipedia is a vanity press where people pride themselves in writing common knowledge and pilfering the shoes off the experts who took the necessary steps to truthfully make knowledgeable and cited pieces of writing.

I also just saw that vanity press, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, is a publishing house that publishes books at the author's expense, I might have taken the wrong direction in the answer to this question, but I also think that since the authors of Wikipedia aren't dealing with money, that the vanity press for Wikipedia is a different 'species' per se and needs a different kind of answer.

And I don't think everyone who writes for Wikipedia plagiarizes, I'm just saying it happens and there isn't much anyone can/will do to monitor it. Authorship and Wikipedia don't exactly have a mutualistic relationship.