Grumpy Old Ben

Many thanks to m'good friend Simon for putting his GCSE revision on hold and tidying up my Wikipedia entry. He may be destined for a life of serving burgers and fries rather than designing mighty engineering projects as a result, but it will have been for a good cause and I'm sure my friendship with his parents won't be strained in any way.

And if the worst comes to the worst, he has a younger brother so the next generation needn't be a complete write-off.

The question has arisen, though: couldn't I have done it myself? To which I reply, of course I could. You are speaking to the proud creator of Wikipedia's article on SkyDiver (and I don't mean people who jump out of planes) and tweaker of too many articles to mention. But dammit, that's not what Wikipedia is for.

I'm old fashioned. I believe in the spirit of things, and that isn't necessarily making money, even though that is one of the three potential applications for which any new technology is immediately considered. (The other two being killing people, and porn.) I'd often considered starting up a self-promoting Wikipedia article. I never did because I reckoned if I got famous enough to need one, one would come up. There's nothing wrong with using web technology to self-promote, of course. I have a site and a blog for that. But not Wikipedia - it's meant to be a neutral, objective reference source in the best academic tradition.

Likewise, the reviews section of Amazon is meant to be a forum for sharing genuine opinions of books, not hijacking by authors to push themselves. (See Ansibles 181, 219 and here.) eBay is another nice idea, inappropriately used. If you can shift something for more than you paid for it, and make a small profit, then bully for you - but by and large and generally speaking, eBay is there for getting rid of items you no longer need or want or require and it shouldn't be a primary point of sale. I have no objection to books of mine being sold there, even signed ones. I've signed books in bookshops before. But I dislike signing books that turn out to be earmarked for eBay flogging - in fact, having now twigged the scam, I won't. (Especially when I see them pushed as "rare, signed copies". Believe me, it's the unsigned ones that are the rarities.) You want to sell books on the web, set up your own web site.

End audition for "Grumpy Old Men". And why do newspaper boys never whistle nowadays?