When Will I Be Famous?i

Normal spam works on the basis of volume: send out umpteen thousand emails with offers for different things, and even at a 0.1% response rate you can hope to turn a profit. Academic spam is a bit more tailored, at least going to the trouble of trawling a few databases – we are all, I imagine, familiar with the sort of email than begins “we are huge admirers of your ground-breaking article Short review of edited collection on Thucydides and so solicit your expertise to act as guest editor/join out editorial board/submit your latest paper to International Journal of Subdermal Haematology“.

Others adopt the same approach to offer something more niche, and superficially less dodgy: we will help you present your research project Short review of edited collection on Thucydides to non-academic audiences by including a piece in our publication or by creating an animation. Leaving aside the fact that, if I wanted to produce another animation, I’d immediately try to contact the brilliant students from Falmouth who did Thucydides: Heavyweight Champion Historian of the World with me, I have no idea why these people imagine I would have any money to give them. But it’s the spam principle: identify something that academics might want – given its importance in REF, the idea of doing a video might seem like an easy way of scoring a bit of Impact – and if you send out enough messages, sooner or later you’ll hit on someone with a research budget big enough to have some unallocated funds lying around.

This morning’s spam folder offered something much more exciting and original, a really clever identification of a potential market, based less on knowledge of the workings of the UK Higher Education and more on knowledge of academic psychology. I simply have to quote it in full – though without giving the author the benefit of any free advertising:

Hello Neville,

I am a freelance writer and I write Wikipedia pages for academics and researchers. In a quick Google search of your name, I discovered that you do not have a Wikipedia page.

Would you like to have a Wikipedia page? If yes, then I can help you. Having written Wikipedia pages for over 400 individuals, I can write an excellent page for you. For your safety and assurance, there will be NO upfront payment required. You only have to pay AFTER the work is complete and you are happy with it.

Academics who have accomplished much less have Wikipedia pages because they have got them made. It’s time you get one too. Just send me a message and I will forward you the cost and time frame details for writing your Wikipedia page.

Best,

That is just so cunning. It isn’t too over the top – “your renowned brilliance and eminence demand immediate recognition!” – but rather takes the much more plausible line of “you’re better than those other people, you know”. Who among us, at least of a certain age, has not muttered darkly about the fact that Certain Colleagues, mostly in Specific Universities, seem to have acquired Wikipedia pages when they’re no more important or distinguished or prolific than we are? Doesn’t it explain everything if they actually paid for them, rather than being genuinely notable?

And I can make a decent case for my academic contribution being perfectly notable in Wikipedia terms, it’s just that I don’t have any sufficiently sycophantic former students to set up a page for me… It’s not like I’d be blowing my own trumpet, or making my own edits – we all know THAT’s bad. It’s just a matter of ensuring that Wikipedia properly reflects the actual state of research in classics and ancient history in the UK – it’s more like a public service, really…

In fact, the only way that message could have been more persuasive is if it had hinted at the fact that female classicists have a whole organisation creating pages for them, and isn’t that taking representation to the point of being unrepresentative..? Don’t you deserve a bit of recognition, despite being male, and not at Oxbridge?

Now, of course I am immune to such blandishments, not just because I refuse to take myself entirely seriously even in my less modest moments, but because actually I do have a Wikipedia page. Admittedly it’s in German, but a prophet is always without honour in his own country…