Should I have a Wikipedia Page about Myself? Tech-Generated Fame

Emails That Invite You To Have Wikipedia Page and Become Famous

I receive the above email at my University of Cambridge email address that apparently, I have achievements, I should be famous, and I deserve a Wikipedia page! Then I will appear on top of search results with a photo. What an honour!!! The question I have here is why such scammers succeed in getting our money. If you want to skip, go to the headline starting with WHY below.

My online presence shows scammers and spammers I look stupid enough to believe this trap. Indeed, I should be very stupid to believe I am worthy of a Wikipedia page.

Firstly, you can have a Wikipedia Page about you.

Secondly, your page will be deleted after a while.

Thirdly, read this Wikipedia article before deciding.

Finally, having a Wikipedia page is worthless if you are unknown because no one will search or find your page.

I have seen this before. Even when I did not have social media profiles or an online presence, I was contacted by other types of scammers/spammers:

Please Publish Your Master Dissertation as a Book!

Years ago, when I shared my master’s dissertation for free online (in Persian=Farsi with an English abstract), I received an email from Lambert Publishing to publish it as a book for free and give up the copyright to Lambert to sell it. They would upload my file and the cover I designed without touching it, and it became my book for them to sell! I declined because in my field — medical library and information science — it is known:

The books, book chapters, and review papers are usually written by experts in the field who have dedicated ‘decades’ of their lives to a specific field and have earned expertise through teaching, studying, and research. If it is textbooks, it should be written and edited by tens or hundreds of experts in the field. Just because you are invited by an unknown publisher, it does not mean you should go for it.

There were people getting recognition in the University for publishing with Lambert, which helped them to get promoted to the professorship for publishing an — and I cannot emphasise enough — “ENGLISH REFERENCE TEXTBOOK” with the same publisher. Wow. They stayed professors even after the universities found out about the scam. Will a Wikipedia page do the same for a professorship?

Publish A Book Chapter or a Paper with Us

Well, there is no month when I don’t have a request — oh, Sorry, I might’ve offended them, not a request but an INVITATION — for a book chapter or paper. Sometimes they are begging you for a letter or a commentary. Other times they publish under your name without telling you! Yes, they have done this before. I see people who have published tens of papers in predatory journals and received recognition. It’s just that it takes time for people to find out about predatory publishers and journals, especially when some of these predatory journals have Impact Factor (the love of blind academics), and all or some of their papers are visible in PubMed — consider that many people don’t know the difference between PubMed and MEDLINE.

Rules of Thump to Recognise Predatory Publishers

1. They will email you asking for you to submit your paper.

2. This one is from me. They will NOT have a working DOI, so the papers will not be found if you add a DOI number of one of their published papers after https://doi.org/. Why? Because working DOIs costs money to publishers.

3. The journal will not be known in your field and will usually have a general and broad journal title.

4. They will offer rapid publication.

5. They will not have policies on publication ethics (plagiarism, retraction, erratum, etc.).

6. The email address, website, and published papers’ formatting are unprofessional. Why? Because being professional is costly. You can easily find language and grammatical errors on their website and emails. So they don’t have IT, Editors, or Designers.

7. They ask for submission via email because having a professional online editorial and submission system costs.

8. They charge small and affordable fees for the authors to pay. Because they have skipped all the costly bits above :D

9. If in doubt, ask an expert LIBRARIAN and don’t risk it.

Librarians liberate you from the ignorance prison.

There are other suggested ways, but I don’t recommend them. For example, a lack of indexing in MEDLINE or SCIE is suggested as a way, but it is not easy to judge the indexing without having a librarian for many researchers. The editorial board could be top experts listed there without knowing their name is on the predatory journal’s website! The past issues could be copied papers from other high-quality journals!

WHY do scammers and spammers succeed in trapping intelligent academics?

1. Either we are not intelligent, or they are: Academics are not necessarily intelligent. Nowadays, any lucky person can get a degree and join academia across the globe. I gave you examples of how I have seen people becoming professors. With the competitive nature of academia, most are looking for a shortcut to get recognised in the crowded environment. Why not a Wikipedia page?
2. Matthew Effect: success in academia is biased toward those already known. Last year, a funder gave millions of pounds to a few teams. Before they announced the winners, I guessed all winners correctly without looking at their applications! The applications are not publicly available, so the public who pays taxes and funds these teams will know if the winners are given the funding fairly. I knew at least four groups who were unsuccessful, who received letters of decision with errors (wrong reasons) in them! But the decisions are ALWAYS final; No Appeal. Is it fair? Fair is when you know something is wrong and take it to an independent court to judge. In short, since the applications are not blind or double-blind, the funder gives the public money to famous ones; you can work for them but cannot be their line manager — a very old tradition in tribes. Some even argue that such judgement cannot be blinded, but the same people avoid outsourcing the peer-review of applications to external people with no conflict of interests (not knowing the famous people!). This practice encourages people to reach that fame as soon as possible in other ways to get funding. How? Maybe a Wikipedia page!
3. Tribal Life: Unfortunately, it’s all about friends and family. If you are not part of the tribe, you are out — I can call it networking, but it will be a lie. I see papers about methodologies where 80% of the authors have never used or developed that methodology. How? They are in the tribe (Group, Department, University, or Country). We don’t bother to ask experts we don’t know personally because they are geographically distant to be co-authors, whereas those we ‘know’ or those lucky to be known are around. Do I have to tell you how country-biased we are? This approach is very similar to what dictators do. Scammers are here to help you fight a dictatorship and become famous fast. A Wikipedia page?
4. Academic Ladder or Bladder: if you try to have a good life and a successful career, you will know it is almost impossible to have a life-work balance right now in academia. Academia expects you to do a lot of free labour —sorry should I call it volunteering for science — for the wealthy university and for wealthy commercial publishers (authorship, peer-review, editoring) all on the side of your main job. Then you should apply for grants and teach and supervise, and the academia MIGHT promote you and give you only 10–30% of what you earn for academia. It means many end up in the bladder rather than the ladder. In other words, all your free work brings money to wealthy academia and commercial publishers but nothing for you except for losing your time/life. Scammers are here with their shortcuts — from publishing your papers and making your editor to having a Wikipedia page.
5. What is Your Name: If it is not an English or a memorable name, you are more likely to be doomed. This is on the side of the conscious and unconscious bias that already exists (Adam or Mohamed — who gets the job?). No wonder why many change their first, last, or both names. In my first year in the UK, people spelt my first name, which has only 6 letters, in 8 different ways in emails; I did not know if 8 mis-spellings were even possible; I mean, who am I to get a correct spelling? Just another poor LMIC foreigner here for the free money without working 14–16 hours a day (as I currently do). If the name is unfamiliar or unknown, most stay away from it. At the end of the day “What You Don’t Know Can Kill You”. A Wikipedia page could become handy.
6. Money buys fame: With universities’ interest in self-fund students who can pay from their pocket to get a degree, it is more likely to have a generation of graduates is likely to pay for fame. If money can get them a PhD, why not pay for a Wikipedia page?
7. Waiting for Recognition Does Not Work. Bad for introverts like myself. Being humble was a thing for scientists and academics; now, if you are not noisy, you don’t exist in the crowd. You can sit and wait to be recognised one day (unlikely) or start serving yourself by making yourself recognised. An Azerbaijani proverb says:

There is no yum yum for the baby who does not cry!

Conclusion: Use or Get Abused

• If the community knows you, you won’t need a Wikipedia page.
• Academia is as unfair as life. You get to play with the cards you get.
• This will continue as long as you pay with your money or time instead of getting paid.
• We don’t teach the juniors about Academic Heaven and Hell. It is important to recognise the difference between use and abuse in academia.
• Academia will stay the same as long as you teach for free, supervise for free, research for free, publish for free (no royalties), peer-review for free, and become an editor for free. Unless doing these for ‘free’ pays your bills. Don’t pay someone to create a Wikipedia page for you.

Let me know what you think.

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