All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XVII

[robkelk]

Okay, what do the other mods think about an author recommending his own fanfic on a fic recommendations page?

New XanderMartin98 has gone ahead and put his own fic on the recs page for Courage the Cowardly Dog. 

I should have expected it seeing how much work he's been putting into writing pages for all his smutty fanfics. but for some reason I wasn't and this caught me by surprise.  While I have no problem with a fic author writing pages for his own work (I'd be a bit of a hypocrite if I did), a recommendation is something else entirely.  Those should be made by readers who enjoyed the work, not the author trying to shill it.

I am tempted to remove it on those grounds, but I wanted to get a consensus of the mods first.  (And I may repost this question on the wiki itself, just to make sure I reach everyone.)  Should we permit authors to recommend their own works?

Hmmmmm...

When I find a page written by the creator of the work being described, I add this banner to it:
{{cleanup|The original version of this article was written by the writer of the work being discussed. [[Death of the Author|Other viewpoints are requested]].}}
Thus showing that there's a bias in play.

Since there is a bias in play, I would be hesitant to accept a recommendation by the work's author. That statement is essentially "Hey, look at what I did!"

So... while I think that a work page created by the creator of the work is okay as long as it's identified as such, a recommendation of a work by the creator of the work goes too far into Shameless Self Promoter, IMHO.


EDIT: And I see he overcoded the internal link again.