At least 2 people I went to college with have bios. One became documentary filmmaker. I thought she was pleasant enough as a dormmate, but I don’t think the administration liked her much. She’s a bit nutty, but seems to have found her niche. The other is missing and presumed dead. He had a claim to notability as an academic before disappearing. He’s not someone who’d do well as a missing person. Wikipedia won’t say it without a reliable source identifying the corpse, but he’s dead and has been since the day wandered off.
I thought a third guy had a good chance at an article, but it’s just a redirect to the rodent he named himself after.
I thought a third guy had a good chance at an article, but it’s just a redirect to the rodent he named himself after.
I have sooo many questions, but I don’t want you to answer them because some things are best left a mystery.
I want them answered
Yeah @EyeBeam@links.hackliberty.org, tell us the story about the man named after a rat please!
It could be a capybara too !
It could be, but I’d put money down on it being a rat.
Yes a bunch. Mostly computer and math people, but a few authors, musicians etc. It doesn’t take much to become a Wikipedia article
victimsubject.I knew two that have their own pages, and know one mentioned in a Wikipedia page but doesn’t actually have his own dedicated page.
I knew:
Lee Vincent, my best friend’s dad when I was a kid.
And
Josh Phillips, another childhood friend, who, later on after we both moved away, murdered an eight year old girl and hid the body under his bed for several days. His mom found the body when it started to smell.
Currently:
My wife is a second cousin of the lead guitarist for a major international rock/metal band I guarantee you’ve heard of. We’ve hung out with him a few times. Really nice guy. I’m not putting the name because some of y’all creepy and might be able to identify us based on info in this post.
(Edited to remove potentially identifying familial relation)
Not trying to be a creep. But I wonder with this data, can a detective piece together who you are in real life.
Good point. Edited. Thanks for the lookout homie.
Heads up, your link to Josh P doesn’t seems to work I think it’s missing a closing bracket This one should work I think.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Phillips_(murderer))
Also, Jesus Christ… I imagine it’s pretty weird to have known someone who would did something like that.
Link works for me. I think the parens in the link target are borking it for some people.
As for what it’s like…. It’s weird. I knew him when we were both like 10 or so. My mom and his mom were pretty good friends, so I’d go over to his house any time they wanted to hang out.
He was a normal kid. He liked Nintendo and was trying to learn to play guitar.
His dad though… his dad was a raving psychopath. He used to beat the shit out of both him and his mom. I damn near caught a beating from him once until mom declared that if he was there, we wouldn’t be.
Eventually, I moved to another state, and his family moved to Florida.
A few years later, I was in freshman English class in high school (year 9 for the Brits), and an office runner came and told me I had a phone call.
It was my mom. “Josh killed a girl.” I’m not sure why she thought it was necessary to tell me at school since there was nothing to be done about it, but I guess she wanted to break the news to me before I saw it online or something.
The story on Wiki is pretty accurate from there. His mom was cleaning his room while he was at school because it was starting to smell when she noticed a wet spot under his bed, investigated, and found the body of a missing neighbor girl.
She had been missing for a week or so, I think; it’s been a while. While she was missing, he had even participated in the neighborhood searches for her.
I remember following the story as it developed. It was weird af to be reading about the kid I used to play Mario with on cnn. There was a whole media circus about him. We weren’t involved in any way since we had been moved apart for years.
In hindsight, knowing what I know now, there’s still ZERO indication that he would do something like that. He wasn’t a problem kid, he never let on about any weird sexual things (even hints of budding weirdness), if anything, I was a bad influence on him - he was a well behaved kid and I was the friend that was always like “hey, let’s go throw rocks at cars” or something because I was a little shithead.
I 100% believe the “scared dumbass kid” story the defense put out. I don’t for a second believe any of the “sexually motivated” shit. Every 14 year old had porn hidden in their room in those days. That doesn’t make him a crazed sex killer.
He was a scared kid with a terrifying abusive father that panicked and did something horrifying that can never be taken back.
Did he murder a child? Yes. Is he to blame? 100%.
I do not condone, approve of, or support what he did in any way whatsoever. But knowing his dad, I understand WHY it happened.
Wow, thanks for the detailed and nuanced insight. I’m sorry that something like that came into your life, and I hope you’re ok. Such a sad story.
Eh, I mean, clearly I’m not OKAY with what happened. It was a goddamned tragedy. But apart from initial shock and disbelief, it didn’t really affect me psychologically at all. It had been 4+ years since I had last spoken to him, and I wasn’t actually involved in any way apart from getting updates from my mom when she’d talk to his mom. So it didn’t leave any lasting effect. Not on me at least. I feel terrible for Maddie’s family and completely understand why they’d want him to rot in prison forever.
I’ve got two kids now, and if somebody did that to one of them… there’s a good chance I’D be the one in prison forever once I got ahold of the guy who did it.
Yeah, understood. Thanks again.
I’m related to someone who’s a Wikipedia admin. Admins typically have their own pages with bios, but admin bios are categorized differently from the rest of Wikipedia
Every user on Wikipedia can have their own page in the User namespace
Worse.
I know someone with an Encyclopedia Dramatica article written about them.
Please do tell us more
All I am willing to say is he is in a discord server I’m also in, and his article details an… Unhealthy obsession he has with Dora the Explorer.
I think that tells me enough to not ask you more details lol
Since I work in Bay Area tech I’ve met a bunch of people who do, like Guido van Rossum and Sergey Brin. But I only really know one, an astronomer I used to work with.
I personally know Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who announced publicly in 2022 that he believed Google’s LaMDA large language model was becoming sentient. He doesn’t have a whole article about him, but he’s a whole section on LaMDA’s Wikipedia article.
This sounds like a true story, bob.
Blake’s a good guy, but a little off-putting in person. He’s what my grandmother would call “a character.” I have no doubt he believes what he says, but I doubt the versatility of his claims on this.
Yes.
If you’ve worked in construction, you may know people who ruined their lives playing pro sports in leagues that don’t set you up for life. An example, the CFL.
Sad. Ruined how usually? Concussions n injuries, substances…?
Knees and brains usually.
Too many pro-sports leagues use a pay structure that leaves players earning far too little, and the players end their careers with injuries and no compensation.
Depends on the person.
Even if you didn’t get injured, or sexually assaulted as part of “hazing”, or pick up a drug habit, playing a sport at a professional level will often ruin you.
During high school you spend all of your non-school time training, so no after school job and your grades probably aren’t great.
Then you get to university, where you play the sport without being paid, and you one again can’t really have a job or focus on your studies.
Then you get drafted (or just hired for some league) into the sport, and you play until your body isn’t good enough anymore. You are then discarded with no job experience, no training, and possibly moving teams/cities every couple years so you don’t really have any non-sport contacts.If you get into a league that pays insanely well, you are likely fiscally fine. That’s like the NHL, or the NFL. If you only get into the CFL, the WHL, the “minors”, or you play in a women’s league or a sport that not enough people care about, you probably were not paid enough to survive once the game is over.
So, what do you do with no job experience, no contacts, shrinking savings? You get a job that you can leverage your celebrity, like real estate or car sales, or something that you can also do if you have a criminal record or no CV, like roofing or landscaping.
Edit: not that there is anything wrong with any of those jobs, but starting to learn a new job at 40 isn’t fun. Also, if your body isn’t in top-shape anymore, roofing and landscaping is brutal.
I have a few professors who have wikipedia pages if that counts.
my uncle, he’s a fellow of the Linux foundation
Unfortunately no. Not that many people from Morocco are very well known outside of Morocco, and especially not well known enough to have an article on English Wikipedia.
And out of all the Moroccan people who are on that site, I don’t know any of them personally.
Maybe I’ll be the first one once I actually start my music career… outside Morocco because f*** that country. (I’m going to jail now, aren’t I?)
Besides what we hear from outside, what do you hate about it?
Well here’s the thing, I’m too disconnected from the local culture, we’re so much poorer than you think yet we brag about how capable we are at hosting world events, there’s racism here, if you’re not Muslim or Jewish then you basically don’t matter, if you’re queer then you also don’t matter, the obsession with football is insane, the local music scene sucks, the education is leagues behind what some of you might call “good”, not to mention terrible terrible television, poor internet speeds, architecture that may look cool but will definitely collapse one day if not taken care of, I could go on and on.
Basically, I have trouble fitting in with society, and I wanna move out. But I don’t know if anyone would wanna take me in.
if you’re not . . . Jewish then you basically don’t matter
That part is wild. That sounds like much better treatment than Jewish people can expect in many places
You like the food? You close with your parents or family?
The answer to that last question is no.
Also, even if you are Jewish, you don’t matter AS much as the Muslims, they’re basically treated as second class citizens. Yes, antisemitism is a real thing over here, as much as the state is trying to hide it. And even then, you need ancestral links to Judaism, you can’t just convert.
A few. Most recent is my neighbour.
I know a lot of people in the film industry
No, but every so often I add myself to my towns page to see how long it lasts.
I did that once on the page for my birthday. Got removed less than 24 hours.
I knew a couple athletes in college that played professionally and have pages.
