Talk:Jesse Sheidlower

Getting started

Let's see how quickly we can move out of sub-stub-land!

I just found a decent reference, [1], but I haven't had time to incorporate the information it contains. If another editor feels like it, go for it. There's not quite enough information there to deduce his birth year; it's either 1967 or 1968. ACW 23:28, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

Wouldn't it be fairly trivial to get in touch with Sheidlower and ask him? Then he could tell you that he was born on 5 August 1968. Or is that considered akin to editing your own entry, and thus frowned upon?

A good question, and it seems like a good idea at first blush. However, the policy WP:NOR teaches us to avoid doing original research; Wikipedia is not a primary source. But anyway. If you, o Jocular Anonymous Editor, happen to know Mr. Sheidlower (or, as a special case, to be Mr. Sheidlower) the right thing to do would be to point us lowly editors at a reliable primary or secondary source. Now, of course, one might argue that Mr. Sheidlower himself ought to be considered a reliable primary source. And so he surely is. But unfortunately such inside intelligence is not verifiable; someone who read the Wikipedia account and wanted to fact-check it could not (reliably) get in touch with the subject. It sounds horribly bureaucratic, but this is how Wikipedia polices its content. ACW 20:07, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

While I (Jesse Sheidlower) understand the motives behind such a policy, it seems that in cases like this it will result either in facts that can't be stated (for example, I don't know how you could definitively determine when I started at OED without asking me or the OUP HR department), or "facts" that are wrong, because so much of what appears in newspapers or magazines is wrong (for example, the N.Y. Times article linked above states that I started "last spring" (by implication the spring of 2000), but this is not the case). So I can sit here and direct you to slices of certain articles that happen to contain true information.

So, my birth year is 1968, stated in [2] (which gets other things wrong). I started at OED in August, 1999, which I don't know how to prove but this Slate article from 18 October 1999 already identifies me by my job title, proving wrong the "March of 2000" claim in the entry. My current title is Editor-at-large, which you can find on the OED Staff page. The "educated in linguistics" is true but misleading; my undergraduate degree was in English, and my graduate work (unfinished) was in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic at Cambridge, both facts shown here.

I'm not trying to write my own entry, or even to suggest what should be in it, but I do want the facts to be factual.

It's a stumper, and I'm not sure what to do about it. All the ways out I can imagine require some third party to research and publish (either in print or on the Web) a biography of the subject. This third party could be the subject, in fact; I'm fairly sure that Wikipedia gleefully uses info from subjects' own web pages. So if the subject were to put up a web page with a biographical sketch, that page would be a fine source.

This must be frustrating for the subject, and arouse quite a sense of irony, since the subject is a professional editor of reference materials. (And we Wikipedians are almost all rank amateurs.)ACW 18:22, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

Given that Jesse did go to the trouble of sourcing his assertions, I think it's only polite to correct the errors. So I've corrected them. --Ben Rosengart

Ref for inclusion

[3] - Moved from Hippie (etymology). —Viriditas | Talk 04:41, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

Planning to work on this article and notice of possible COI

I'm planning to do some expansion of this article. I know Jesse Sheidlower in real life through the OED SF citations project; I mention it in case it could be seen as a conflict of interest. I'll only be adding material I can source properly. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 00:45, 13 August 2020 (UTC)