Up front disclosure — Tony Pierce is a friend. However, he is only a friend because he blogs and I blog. Blogging brought us together. We’ve partied together and we’ve been to baseball games together and we’ve drank together. If he didn’t blog, and I didn’t blog, we would have never met.
And to me, Tony Pierce is a phenomenally good blogger — a blogger to study and emulate if you need a tutor. He is a Bukowski of blogging. He’s also been fabulously successful. It’s now how he makes his living (at LAist.com) and he’s been featured in much major media. According to Technorati, his blog is among the most popular in the world (anything better than a 10,000 ranking among the tens of millions of blogs tracked is pretty damn good). And despite all that, a group of hacks are suggesting that Tony Pierce doesn’t deserve a Wikipedia entry.
His entry is here. The voting is here. You can track the vote count here (though Wikipedia voting is more subjective for editors than a pure tally — though as I write, 71 percent of the votes are for delete). Information from and about the cretins who started this can be found here. It’s part of an orchestrated effort to remove bloggers whom they consider unworthy of Wikipedia enshrinement. Obviously, they picked the wrong target here. It will be sad if they win. It would greatly diminish my trust in Wikipedia as an example of reliable crowdsourcing.
