Choose Your Own Adventure of CYOA History, If you choose to ignore the published sources, turn to Page 23 Options

[milowent]

For a few weeks now, the Choose Your Own Adventure article, about the best-selling children's book series from the 80s/90s, has been stubbed down to a paragraph and put under WP:OFFICE.

Though we're not told, the problem appears to be a dispute over who should get credit for the series. Until about Oct 2010, the article credited Edward Packard as the creator of the series and concept. News reports from the the early 80s are pretty clear on that (1)(2). But some small amount of credit also belonged to R.A. Montgomery, owner of the small press that first published Packard's works, helped get it to the big league Bantam, and subsequently authored many titles.

Bantam let the series go out of print around 2000, and Montomery and his wife bought the trademark rights, founded "ChooseCo" and started reprinting the books. But only the ones they had rights too, i.e., mostly Montgomery's, and certainly not Packard's volumes. (The reprints are renumbered to help mask the missing volumes, I suppose.)

Back in October (and perhaps before?), the CYOA article was edited to credit Montgomery as the creator of the series, and among other things, replace the image of the 1st and perhaps most popular book in the series (The Cave of Time) with a cover image of reprint "The Abominable Snowman" (the new #1, #13 in the original series). I and a few editors happened to notice, rolled it back and added a few sources (such as the AP and NYTimes articles cited above) to show Packard was the original creator. We disregarded the press-release fodder pieces from the reprint announcements.

Then came the stubbing and WP:OFFICE stamp, which has lasted for a few weeks now. When I expressed irriation at this, Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation came by to admonish me.

There's little doubt Montgomery and/or his wife is behind this. They appear to have a history. In 2007, Chooseco sued Chrysler over an ad that had the tagline "Choose Your Adventure"--claiming it to be too similar to their trademark, and that the ad campaign too specifically focused on the age range of young men who had grown up reading the books. In the same vein, an August 2009 piece by Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic referenced the series in its title and included the comment "With apologies to Edward Packard and Bantam Books", which was apparently later updated to include a mention of Montgomery and Chooseco.

Editor Kaldari, also a wikimedia employee, has apparently now been tasked with helping recraft the article. So far, they've added two cites, one of which is a dead link article about the ChooseCo reprint introduction, and the 2nd a piece of crap in the "school library journal" that refers to Montgomery as the creator the series, just copying some press release no doubt. E.g., it claims that Chooseco's editors "editors went through the original series and “cherry picked” bestselling titles, books particularly beloved by readers, and staff favorites," instead of admitting that they "cherrypicked" the books they had rights to, and have no chance to get Packard's, whose volumes are often credited as the best. Packard, on his part, is republishing his titles as e-books under the "U-Ventures" tag.

I've never run into WP:OFFICE before, so I have no idea what triggers it, or how this will turn out. How many articles can you find that get slanted one way or another without such a drastic move being made, and then you see it morph towards the "wrong version".

This post has been edited by milowent: Sun 30th January 2011, 5:57am

[thekohser]

Note, also... Beaudette does seem to be imagining himself as the new Mike Godwin, at least on these "WP:OFFICE" content matters.