Resumes and Vanity Pages
"People who boast about their IQ are losers." - Stephen Hawking
Somebody recently mentioned Wikipedia pages as measures of notability or yardsticks of importance. Anyone who has known Wikipedia for nearly 25 years (a bit less) understands that anybody can create new Wikipedia pages about anything and anyone. I created a Wikipedia page around 23 years ago. What's more, Wikipedia now has customers (via its foundation, which has languished); they get to control not only what Wikipedia says about them but what Wikipedia says about all sorts of topics that matter to them (they are, in effect, Wikipedia "stakeholders"). Wikipedia is fast becoming a glorified marketing company.
Then there are things like LinkedIn pages that are things people use to share way to much information about themselves; in social control media people can buy fake subscribers/followers and as Clickfraud Spamnil proves, in YouTube videos it's not uncommon for 99% of all "views" to be fakes (bots).
Wikipedia isn't objective; it never was. It's a very rich company that thrives in the false perception that because many people are involved in editing, then it'll eventually strike the right balance.
People's accomplishments cannot be enumerated in forms like "followers" or quantified reliably in an "attention economy", wherein musicians who say truly terrible things can gain all the attention (not to be conflated with fame but with infamy).
Before Wikipedia many in my area quantified their importance using sites like CiteSeer, which is now offline:
Michael Ley's DBLP has been around almost for as long as the Web (1993). Like arxiv.org, it now faces problems due to slop or fake papers disguised as legitimate work.
The truth of the matter is, all those centralised platforms are nothing but private databases that are subjective, incomplete, and volatile. People ought to get back to how things used to be in the 90s. People sent CVs only to those who needed them (shredding happened later), assessment of qualification was done based on documents rather than hearsay, and people didn't spend money and time on bots and fake popularity.
The "slop generation" is already doing enormous damage to Wikipedia. Can it outlive this nonsense? █