Chris has been Wikipediafied

It was only a matter of time. Chris Soghoian has become a Wikipedia article.

As I noted earlier (), Congressman Ed Markey (D-Mass) had his own article edited to include a blurb on his initial call for Chris’s arrest. On Sunday, someone handled “Manc ill kid” started a page on Christopher Soghoian. It has since been edited, thanks in part to the page being added to the Spotlight project, which gathers together a group of editors to flush out a single article at a time.

The article change history goes as follows:

1. Oct. 29 @ 12:15p — Chris’s wikiness begins with: “Christopher Soghoian is a 24-year old computer science PhD student at Indiana University’s School of Informatics in Bloomington and the creator of a website that generated fake airline boarding passes.”
2. Oct 29 @ 2:17p — Australian Chris Chittleborough adds links to Chris’s personal profile and his blog, also adding a U.S. politics stub.
3. Oct 29 @ 4:57p — Some formatting edits by Night Gyr also add a new update on the situation: “On October 28, 2006 his home was raided by agents of the FBI to seize computers and other materials related to Federal charges for conspiracy to commit fraud and forgery.” Chris is also categorized as Living People.
4. Oct. 29 @ 6:07p — Tawker adds the following (with a reference link: “Ironically Senator Schumer (D-NY) posted information on how to exploit the exact same security breach yet has not been arrested or in any way harassed by the FBI.”
5. Oct. 29 @ 9:28p — Night Gyr returns to do some advanced wiki editing, like turning the external link into a formal reference, specifying a section for the School of Informatics in the Indiana University article, and cleaning up the previous author’s text addition.
6. Oct. 30 @ 9:22a — A bot cleans up some capitalization.
7. Oct. 30 @ 1:51p — Perhaps some local care for the new article is showing, as Suso (no user profile at the time, but likely a reference to suso.org, a local ISP) adds a reference to Chris’s article in the local wiki, Bloomingpedia. The local wiki, btw, also has a separate article on the ransacking of Chris’s apartment and a list of links to media coverage.
8. Oct. 31 @ 6:49p — Night Gyr, who is the early custodian of this article, returns to add a link to Markey’s latest press release

I know that in theory anyone and anything can become a Wikipedia page. However, in practice that isn’t true. There is a community of administrators in that project constantly reviewing new entries to make sure they surpass some subjective measure of importance to be included. Chris heard word of that his wiki page was removed initially, so maybe the above constitutes a second successful attempt to have his article included in the self-organizing tome. I wonder if the fact that AppleScript guru Sal Soghoian (Chris’s uncle as it turns out) has been above that bar for the past two years had any impact. Whatever was in the swirling potion that managed it, it is pretty cool seeing someone I know reach that status.

As I continue to pull for Chris to come through with all of this unscathed, it will be interesting to see how the local wiki content compares with that of Wikipedia.