A world without Wikipedia? Not such a bad idea.

Novelist Amanda Filipacchi, writing in the New York Times, notes that the “citizen scholars” at Wikipedia have been moving women from the category of “American Novelists” to “American Women Novelists.”

She said Wednesday: The intention appears to be to create a list of “American Novelists” on Wikipedia that is made up almost entirely of men.

And since that initial criticism, she writes Sunday, her Wikipedia page has — surprise — been subjected to vandalism.

As soon as the Op-Ed article appeared, unhappy Wikipedia editors pounced on my Wikipedia page and started making alterations to it, erasing as much as they possibly could without (I assume) technically breaking the rules.

They removed the links to outside sources, like interviews of me and reviews of my novels. Not surprisingly, they also removed the link to the Op-Ed article. At the same time, they put up a banner at the top of my page saying the page needed “additional citations for verifications.” Too bad they’d just taken out the useful sources.

In 24 hours, there were 22 changes to my page. Before that, there had been 22 changes in four years. Thursday night, a kind soul went in there and put back the deleted sources. The Wiki editors instantly took them out again.

Check out the history of her Wikipedia page here.

And if you want to burn a lot of time, read the talk on her Wikipedia page.

Here’s a sample: “Wikipedia is not at war with women writers, though it may appear that we’re a bunch of idiots (and that is hard to deny).”

The L.A. Daily Mirror is continuing its own critique of Wikipedia and its eight dueling entries on Wallace Beery’s purported role in the death of Ted Healy.

Wikipedia: Murder and Myth: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3