Oh dear it seems the wiki page on both my book and myself is doomed, doomed! see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/ARIA_%28novel%29 …

I used to teach vicious circles to non-vicious kids. There are plenty of examples in Geography for example the cycle of poverty where lack of investment in a region leads to low wages, hence low purchasing, less investment lower wages, etc. Luckily there are cycles of recovery too as when investment results in higher wages, higher purchasing levels, etc. I experienced my own vicious circle with the free database, Wikipedia recently.

I used to trust the veracity of things in Wikipedia but I don’t anymore – yes I was always cautious about factual items that weren’t referenced and probably spoof pieces about famous people but now I have personal experience of the truth being removed about me and my books and untruths put in their place by ‘experts’, well, it’s about time Wiki had a rival.

Years ago a publicist for one of my publishers created a wiki page for me and it just about still exists at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoff_Nelder along with a picture of me doing a book signing. Some of the Wikipedia experts who police the site are considering deleting me because I am insufficiently notable. That is, I am not famous enough to warrant them having a page about me. I’m quite sad at the lacerations that have already taken place there including the removal without any discussion or permission of aspects of my historical development as an author and person. I loved it when a former student posted there an item of how I featured in a computer game of his after I’d taught him the Pascal computer language – all gone and not by him.

Even more at risk is the page about my ARIA Trilogy, which at the moment exists at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARIA_(novel). This page was originally created by Jolie Du Pre, who was a publicist for ARIA’s publisher LL-Publications. Others have tweaked it since. You are not allowed to be too personally involved for example in creating a page about yourself for obvious self-promoting reasons. The whole idea to have wiki entries about me and my books is not for promotion but for information and networking the ideas and linked facts. The ARIA (Novel) page was modelled on other authors’ book pages and like theirs we really wanted to include a picture of the book cover. However, even though it was uploaded to Wiki Commons – a store of pictures with copyright permission – wiki always removed it in days because we could not absolutely prove I or the person editing the page created the picture. The artist, Andy Bigwood, is happy to have the cover art there but he hasn’t personally used wiki as a creator as such. I don’t know how other book pages cope. It’s a minefield. Don’t go there unless you have a Masters in mine detecting because the Wiki IEDs will get you!

On the novel page, the Wikipedia ‘experts’ are unhappy that there is a book page and yet the book has not won major awards. Jolie had put there about ARIA: Left Luggage winning the prestigious Preditors & Editors Readers Poll for best science fiction novel of 2012. It was attacked because Tokyo girl (they seem to use nom-de-plumes) assumed incorrectly that the linked report from the British Fantasy Society was the award-giving body. No it wasn’t. P&E was independently established in 1997 and exists primarily to help writers sort out the scams and shams among agents and publishers. See it here. It’s mainly run by lawyer David Kuzminski. How could wiki experts get that so wrong?

The philosophical question then is how famous does a writer need to be to have a book of theirs listed on wiki? It has been argued that in ARIA there is the unique concept of infectious amnesia. This idea has never been used to my knowledge in any fiction or film. It could be referred to later by science fiction writers and researchers and so deserves a wiki pedia page just for that. Sadly, one wiki editor reckons infectious amnesia isn’t an original idea because Herpes Simplex is infectious and can cause amnesia. However, it isn’t anything like the IA in ARIA. In that no one is immune whereas many are immune to herpes. Also the amnesia happens to everyone catching ARIA while memory problems isn’t common to those getting Herpes Simplex. Also the memory loss in ARIA is retrograde where it isn’t in those with memory problems from Herpes. It’s like that ‘expert’ is just looking for reasons to delete my book even when he is wrong, untrustworthy.

There have been good reviews of ARIA and some of those links were added – eg http://www.twistedscifi.com/review-of-aria-left-luggage-by-geoff-nelder/
http://www.thehorrorzine.com/ReviewFolder/AriaLeftLuggage/Luggage.html
However, they were deleted from the wiki page and they quoted in a discussion page a mean review instead. Ho hum.

Why do we do it? It is the case that every writer, artist, sculptor, actor, model and others find themselves under attack by rivals, reviewers, meanies galore. However, then along comes someone writing a fabulous comment on how your work lifted them and changed their outlook for ever. So it goes.

The final irony might be that if the page gets deleted as a result of this controversy and vicious circle then it becomes newsworthy in itself and deserves an entry!

Otherwise defeat Wiki by helping me become more famous although as I said to a tweeter who said I was famous – I am only famous in my street and then for the wrong reasons!

If you are a reviewer I’d be pleased to send you a copy of ARIA: Left Luggage so you can see for yourself how original the concept is. If you a re a wiki expert – help!

Geoff’s UK Amazon author page http://www.amazon.co.uk/Geoff-Nelder/e/B002BMB2XY

And for US readers http://www.amazon.com/Geoff-Nelder/e/B002BMB2XY