Get The Hook

The way theater owners used to get poor performers off the stage in vaudeville was to use a hook mounted on a pole and snatch the offending act off the stage. The audience would usually be the ones prompting the management to get rid of the act by shouting, "Get the hook". The concept was updated and reintroduced in the old Gong Show television program. It seems that there is a cyber-equivalent of the hook over at Wikipedia. If you are not notable, your entry will get voted off Wiki Island.

The Shiny Diamonds, a spunky band from Canada, make music they call "mind-blowing thrash folk." On Wednesday, the lads and their songs were tagged with a less flattering description: "non-notable."

This was not some hasty, capricious opinion, either. No, this was the official verdict of a squad of stern-sounding editors at Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, which recently began the process of booting an entry about the Shiny Diamonds off the site.

One Wiki editor counted a mere 97 Google hits about the group and noted on a Wiki page that all those citations "seem to be myspace or other self-promotion." Three other Wiki editors soon weighed in, each recommending "delete," which in Wiki-speak translates roughly as "Beat it, losers."

Up in Vancouver, B.C., where the band's lead singer was reached by phone, the news hit kind of hard.

"Dude, I don't know what they were thinking," said Tim the Mute, which, you won't be surprised to learn, is a stage name and the only name he would give. In mid-sentence, Tim's cellphone went dead and a few minutes later, he sent an e-mail.

"I urge whatever Internet-snob wiki-geeks who deem our band 'non-notable' to look at their own lives," he fumed. "The Internet is about sharing and the point of Wikipedia is that there's room for everything."

That, it turns out, isn't exactly true.

Casual readers might assume that Wikipedia's goal is a complete account of all earthly knowledge, but the site maintains a rather elaborate set of criteria for admission. The several thousand unpaid volunteers who write and edit Wikipedia spend a lot of energy ensuring that people, bands, companies, and everything else meet what it calls "notability guidelines."

Let's sum it up this way: Not everyone is Wiki-worthy.

I guess the Shiny Diamonds will have to look elsewhere for their 15 minutes.