Introducing WhoseKidAreYou

I’d like to introduce you to a new project. The other day, I was reading an imbecilic union-bashing editorial by one “Hugo Rifkind”, and I wondered….whose kid are you? Wikipedia informed me that diary columnist (it’s like a journalist but not quite) Rifkind is indeed the former Defence and Foreign Secretary’s son, and he’s “written” a “book” about “the London media world” called Overexposed Overexposure, which kicks the bottom out of the rotting barrel of satire.

And there, I had it – we need a Web site to monitor nepotism, and backscratching influence-peddling more generally. WhoseKidAreYou! There’s been quite a lot of work on designing machine-readable ways of expressing relationships between people, but to start with, I reckon we need a decent wiki server or else perhaps a Django install, and the British journalists section of Wikipedia as a start. We can crowdsource the rest; we’ve got bitterness and resentment on our side, plus a powerful kicker of personal loathing!

We’ll need to hold basic biographical data, plus job and publication history, a link to corresponding Wikipedia data, and of course, the crucial affiliations. Not just WhoseKidAreYou, but also WhoseThinktankDoYou”Work”For. Once we’ve got a reasonable amount of data, we can think about social-graph visualisations and other fancy twirls; we could also do a browser extension that picks out bylines, searches the DB in background, and shows a notification. “Did you know this was written by Christopher Hitchens’ illegitimate son, working for a thinktank founded by Douglas Murray?”

I am deadly serious about this, and I would like your comments. The project isn’t really suited to MySociety.org – it’s far from neutral and it’s explicitly partisan and generally vicious – so it’ll have to be unilateral. I’ve set up a Google group (aka a mailing list/usenet group) over here.

UPDATE: More is here, including how to take part.

UPDATE UPDATE: Hugo Rifkind has been in touch, to point out that I misspelled the title of his book.

14 Comments on "Introducing WhoseKidAreYou"


  1. I salute this idea!
    How about ‘Where did you get that ‘in’?’ for a more generic title (to the tune of ‘Where did you get that hat?’ obviously).

    Also, how about some form of ExactlyHowBogusBatshitAndPartisanIsThat OrganisationThatTheBBCIsReportingARandomPressReleaseFrom?

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  2. @celestialweasel:

    fakecharities.org is usually pretty helpful when it comes to answering the EHBBAPITOTTBIRARPRF problem…

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  3. isn’t this just an exyension of the ad hominem fallacy? That what these people might say doesn’t matter, because of who they happen to be?

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  4. He’s Malcolm Rifkind’s son (and ancient old Sparts like us don’t like Malcolm Rifkind); he’s critical of unions (because unions are selfless tribunes of the people, yay!); discount his opinion.

    That is as neat an encapsulation of the ad hominem fallacy as I’ve yet seen.

    Catastrophically wrong-headed. You might as well adduce the fact that one Hitchens brother (Christopher) is a Trotskyite to vititate the opinions of the other (Peter), who is a paleo-conservative. One’s pro-Iraq War. One’s anti. Guess which one?

    When people like you accept the fact that Richard Gott is a KGB shill, then I might take you seriously.

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  5. Of course, you could also have a version titled ‘WhoseOxbridgeContempoaryWereYou’ – but I suspect the server would crash.

    [respesto]

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  6. As it happens I can’t think any of my Oxbridge contemporaries (in the sense of having attended the same college at the same time) who are actually famous, although I’m fairly sure that several – quite likely more than several – are rich. Media people would however include the talentless Sabine Durant.

    Is Christopher Hitchens a Trotskyite? Not for more than thirty years, I’d have said. If David Gillies knows otherwise I’d be glad to be informed.

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  7. Brilliant!
    But, the “social graphs” have me worried.
    In the spirit of recent conjectured about CDOs, will we find that the subgraphs of backscratchers are intractable and can’t be backcomputed…? 😉

    Sort of like “Murder on a Train”, except they leave their victims alive, mostly.

    Reply

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