Saturday, January 09, 2010

Wold Newton Universe and Wikipedia corrections

Those fans who follow and understand the Wold Newton mythos and Game understand that an incredible amount of research goes into creating well thought out articles, chronologies, and fictional genealogies.

Then there are those who think Wold-Newtonry is merely making what effectively amount to wish lists of characters, and proclaiming they are "in" the Wold Newton Family or the Wold Newton Universe without any thought, consideration, research, or logic. Many times these lists erroneously proclaim that Philip José Farmer himself added these characters. These lists are prevalent on the internet, and unfortunately contribute to giving the Wold Newton concept a bad name among those who don't take the time to study and evaluate the ideas and the mythology.

Ah, the internet.

Now, Wold Newton fan Sean Levin has set out to correct, entry by entry, one particularly bad example of these baseless lists of alleged Wold Newton characters. The work Sean is doing is detailed and meticulous, which is what Wold-Newtonry is all about.

Kudos to Sean... you can check out his posts here and here, the first two in a series entitled "Of Wikis and Wold Newton." And I'll be continuing to post about his ongoing efforts in this area.


6 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks, Win, for highlighting Sean's work!

Win Scott Eckert said...

It's my pleasure!

j purdie said...

Ah, Wikipedia, that well known pantheon of truth. It's getting to be like a tabloid; nobody takes it seriously but everyone reads it, then everyone knows the 'truth'.

Toby O'B said...

Read the fifth entry in Sean's work during the overnight and am very impressed by his diligence in pointing out the errors. [Being the televisiologist that I am, I would never have had the attention span to stick with it.] Glad he's getting it done - can't believe how many of those entries are just so bizarre... and wrong.

Sean Levin said...

Win, thank you so much for promoting my efforts. I hope you found parts 3-5 as satisfying as the first 2.

Win Scott Eckert said...

Yeah, Sean, absolutely!

Will be doing add'l blog posts this weekend.

-Win