Talk:Paul Anderson (journalist)

I posted this page while editing entries on Tribune, Michael Foot and various other things because I wanted to post mini-biogs of quite a few people and decided to start with (two lines on) myself: I deleted after reading the rules on autobiographical posting, then found the post reinstated. Que faire?Paulanderson (talk) 20:33, 2 January 2008 (UTC) (Actually posted two years ago.)

This is now embarrassing: someone who knows me has posted anonymously and got some bits right, but actually it should read more like:

Paul Anderson (born 1959) is a British journalist and academic.

Educated at Oxford University (Balliol) and the London College of Printing, Anderson almost joined the International Socialists (UK) as a teenager but the people he knew in the organisation were expelled in 1976 and he drifted into anarchism. At university he was part of the small but feisty Oxford Anarchist Group, which organised countless demonstrations and political stunts, among them a demonstration outside the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford to protest at the award of an honorary degree to Helmut Schmidt, then West German chancellor, as part of a campaign to free Astrid Proll, a member of the Baader Meinhoff Group who had been arrested in London in 1978.

This is seriously annoying: I don't want to edit my own Wikipedia entry, which is there only as part of an attempt to provide a thumbnail of Tribune editors, and what I did as a student is so unimportant as to be unworthy of notice. (I'm not saying this because I'm ashamed of anything, just because I don't think we did anything particularly brilliant, though I and others have dined out on some of our stunts.) What are the manners on this?Paulanderson (talk) 20:55, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

I'm amazed that you didn't get any response to your question since it obviously begged an answer. WP policy would generally be against edits of one's own article. I've offered to do one about an exceptional but largely unrecognized investigative reporter (I think that Van Gogh may never have sold a painting except to his brother, in his lifetime, though I may be misremembering this), but he preferred not to have one. Another superlative ditto with whose work I've been familiar for years mentioned to me that there were errors in his article, but he had abided by the COI protocol and avoided making corrections himself. I sorted that out and probably should have added even more to it. He sent me a note of appreciation. As far as your input is concerned, I'm guessing you didn't want to have your birth date on the article, or you would have put it there, rather than just the year of your birth. I was going to add Jane Mayer's to her article, and was able to source it, but figured she probably didn't want it there or would have done it herself or had someone else do it, so I left it out. Some of the biographical info you've added here would be very difficult to source, as only those to whom you've been personally familiar with would know about it, so there are those who would quibble with such unsourced edits. Some editors seem to live just to do such quibbling, as it may convey some sense of self-importance, without them making truly useful contributions. I'd written an article about reporter Maia Szalavitz (the first I'd ever created) and had a hell of a time finding it, eventually discovering it on NYC voter registration rolls. Activist (talk) 22:05, 6 August 2019 (UTC)