Ian Fleming & Wikipedia
Book Collecting info Blocked at Wikipedia-Why?
A few days ago I posted in this substack about Ian Fleming’s interest in book collecting: Ian Fleming- Astounding Book Collector.
I noticed the Wikipedia page for Ian Fleming did not mention he was a book collector. So I added that information to the Ian Fleming Wikipedia page and it was deleted.
I tried again and I was blocked from editing and called a “sock puppet.” If I think something is interesting sometimes I add to Wikipedia under my name, just as I write here, so accusing me of “sock puppetry” was just a Wikipedia technique to block me from editing the article on Ian Fleming.
I can’t think why adding a true fact with citations—that Ian Fleming was a book collector—would be blocked from Wikipedia.
All I can think of is that “book collecting” isn’t seen as fitting the Fleming image that whoever controls the Wikipedia platform wants to present.
If something as straightforward as adding a few citations to the Wikipedia entry on Fleming is deleted, what else is deleted anywhere in Wikipedia?
Here is the message I wrote to the person at Wikipedia who blocked me from adding the information about Fleming’s book collecting to the Ian Fleming Wikipedia entry:
Why is the information about antiquarian journal, The Book Collector, (which Fleming founded and his nephews now edit) deleted as sock puppetry? The Lilly Library which holds the collection recently had an exhibit and the exhibit is online.
The curator wrote:
Silver, Joel. (2017). Ian Fleming: From Bibiophile to Bond. Lilly Library, Indiana University at Bloomington. Exhibit Notes: Ian Fleming (1908-1964) is well known today as the literary creator of master spy James Bond, but long before Bond, Fleming was a collector of rare books, and his collection, along with his specially-bound corrected typescripts of the Bond novels and the first published editions, are housed in the Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington. Fleming's collection, which was remarkable both in its conception and scope, focused on nineteenth- and twentieth-century “books that had started something,” from landmarks in science and technology to instructional volumes on sports and games. Books from Ian Fleming’s personal collection are now on exhibit at the Lilly Library, alongside typescripts and early editions of the James Bond novels.
Fleming, in the last year of his life contributed many books to a major exhibit in London. He was a book collector most of his life. Why is this "sock puppetry?"
Does this information go against what Wikipedia people want IF to be?— that he also collected books?
Here is the "about" section of The Book Collector: https://www.thebookcollector.co.uk/about
Here is the link to "The Ian Fleming Collection of 19th-20th Century Source Material Concerning Western Civilization together with the Originals of the James Bond-007 Tales"
https://liblilly.sitehost.iu.edu/etexts/fleming/index.shtml
Librarians want to know. Thx.
I have not had a response.
I'm glad I waited to respond. My connection to Wiki-Anything is tenuous. I'm sure you know about camels and committees. Given authoritarians' recent open addiction to censorship, which is uppermost in my mind these days, my initial suspicion was a general objection to private book collections. They are fertile grounds for insurrection.
I'm so sorry, and that's so bizarre. A long time ago, years and years, I got into a Wikipedia fight about whether the Simpsons line "I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords" was originally from "Empire of the Ants". It isn't! I forced myself and my husband to sit through the entire movie! It's not there. It's just a Simpsons thing. Talk about trivial. At least your correction was about a significant writer and interesting facts. I know how it can make you lie awake sulking for a week or so.