User:Sj/war

A letter from a one-time editor.

MY WAR WITH WIKIPEDIA

Spoiler alert: I lost.

For years, I have intended to correct the Wikipedia entry on my late father. People told me that it was easy to do, just click "edit." The entry certainly cried out for correction. My father was not a public figure but was well known in his field, the author of several important and influential books and editor of a basic reference work. I will not name him – I know this seems a bit coy but this essay is about the system, not about him.

Recently, with the publication of a new book of his writings, I figured that people might look him up and then they would find the hash that has been posted in his name for 10+ years. To be specific, the item is about 550 words in length. Subject areas covered are as follows: the religion of his forebears, 5%; a marginal figure in his early life, 8%; his appearances on two local radio shows in his later years, 16%; his cat, 3%. The remaining two thirds among his "notable students"; in her own Wikipedia entry, his name appears in a list of professors whose courses she attended at a university. Considerable space is dedicated to listing various celebrities whom he purportedly influenced (some erroneous) but no information is offered as to what that influence was and why we are reading about him. Although he was an author, there is no complete book list but there is a lengthy list of his recorded radio appearances.

I clicked edit, whereupon I went through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole into Wikiland. The article now appeared unformatted in a plain text with no instruction as to how to edit it. I did a lot of fruitless clicking over the following few days, encountering a series of bewildering renderings, full of italics, brackets, and initials. There was no point of entry where I could edit, so I decided to write a substitute entry. Feeling in control, finally, I wrote an entry about the same length and clicked save. It disappeared. If there is such a thing as a desperate click, and I think there is, I executed desperate clicks in profusion. OK, where's the help desk? After several false starts, I found a customer service click which produced a person who proved to be an illuminating guide through backstage Wiki. I explained that I wrote an entry but it had disappeared. He responded very quickly (and it was a Sunday) that I didn’t put anything in the edit summary, cautioning that if I want to be taken seriously, the edit summary should be extensively used. And the edit summary would be...???? He helpfully suggested that I “talk to the reverter on how best to improve the article.... Remember Wikipedia pages [are] made by consensus, not by the view of one person."

What is a reverter, I wanted to know, and how do I talk to him/her? The response identified the reverer and directed me to his "talk" page; it also provided a number of instructions about an orange banner, a “New Section” that opens a double, blank window with a big box for my added text. I should fill in the boxes, end the text with a squiggly line which will turn into my username and time/date, and save.

In highly abbreviated form, this is what happened over the next few days. I made a sincere effort to follow the instructions but the orange banner did not open a talk or boxes, it just told me I am not logged on. Exasperation was setting in. Why should I be logged on? I asked my guide, and whom am I communicating with? This is not a process for putting reliable information on line but an obstacle course that can be navigated only by people who are good at navigating obstacle courses. Patiently, he explained that they have no experts who examine data; everything must have been published elsewhere in a reliable publication. Editors judge whether the proposed material is a reasonable version of the published work. Aha, editors, I thought. I remember them from the old days. There is hope.

In subsequent exchanges I pointed out to my guide that, other than birth and death dates and some rudimentary biographical details, the existing entry is largely erroneous or utterly without value (e.g., radio shows, "notable" student, cat). The answer was that I could request deletion, which he would help me set up, but there was no guarantee of deletion; it's up to a “consensus of editors.” Or, I could go through the text and identify whatever is wrong by inserting which means citation needed. I would then need to add a note about each such challenge on another page (if I can find it). Then I leave it for a month and see if the unreferenced "facts" have either been documented or removed (by whom?).

Upgrading this worthless entry by poking citation requests into it did not strike me as a way to provide a useful article on my father, even if I could learn how to do it. I opted for deletion and my guide put up a notice opposite the entry that said deletion was requested by the subject’s daughter. He explained that after 7 days an “uninvolved admin” would make a decision based on the arguments “in relation to the various policies.” Since my rewrite had disappeared completely, I asked what the “editors” would evaluate and he explained that they evaluate what is good enough to stay based on their own opinion. All they examine is whether the information is already published elsewhere. If it is, it is “suitable” to stay, under Wikipedia policies. The invention of Wikipedia surely tripled the rotation-in-grave rate of deceased encyclopedic editors.

In due course, the deletion notice disappeared and the original article survived in its pristine glory. I queried my guide and he said “almost everybody voted to keep – so it stays.” He provided a link to the election returns. Indeed seven jurors, no less, had rung in on this and all said keep, that the subject is notable. Several acknowledged that the article needs rewriting. I had mistakenly assumed that there would be a comparison with my proposed draft, but that was not the game. It was in or out. My guide consoled me by explaining that my version is preserved on the current page (if one knows were to click) and suggested that I write a new version that includes all the referenced material in the old one: “removing referenced data is an obvious target for a reversion.” Then I can change the article piece by piece or – another mysterious exercise - construct a user subpage.

So the bottom line was that, even if I could navigate the system (which I couldn’t), I could not remove anything in the original that was referenced, or add anything without providing my own reference.

Yes, the only standard for evaluating an entry was whether every statement was referenced. It is sobering to consider that a “people’s” encyclopedia, relied upon by me and practically everyone else in the world, is built on such a peculiar editorial standard. But, I spluttered to myself (my guide was tired of hearing from me), the existing original entry was not referenced except at the end, in what might be called its bibliography, consisting of two sources: my father’s autobiography and the New York Times obit. Much – a lot – of the text came from neither; it was clearly based on one or another writer’s personal contacts or experiences (e.g., the “notable student,” the marginal early-life association, the excruciating details about the radio shows) and totally unverified. Where were all those judges when this stuff was posted?

The saga of the article itself has a compromised conclusion. I have a contact at Wikipedia whom I called upon midway; he acknowledged that the difficulty of editing entries has been a major concern backstage and encouraged me to press on. At last, he mercifully stepped in, picked up some material from my proposed replacement (sure enough, it was back there in the wings someplace if you knew where to click), eliminated the not notable student, left the cat, and attached the full list of books. It will still not be of much use to anyone who reads it, since it doesn’t explain why he was notable.

But more must be said about Wikipedia. As I bored my friends with this saga, many offered their own experiences of looking up something they knew about and finding their knowledge contradicted. The consensus never to rely on it as a sole source. (Hip types asserted the margin notes in their Encyclopedia Britannica.) I must admit that I was astonished by the amount of communication that goes on backstage between various (what I guess they call) editors and the insistence upon consensus in creating or altering the entries. Seemingly, every contributor to each entry is identified in the entry’s history, going back over years, and I even blundered onto a site with a bar chart showing how many times the entries have been consulted. (I could never find that one again.) Other random clicks revealed massive statistical analyses of Wikipedia materials and processes and lengthy editorial statements. All the editors involved have their own biographies posted backstage on the site, most of them quite delightful and amusing and they are a diverse international bunch, demonstrating that there are a lot of smart people worldwide with independent sources of income.

But consensus doth not an encyclopedia make. Somewhere there must be a shared standard of inclusiveness, balance, authority - qualities that are not compatible with Wikipedia’s democratic, or perhaps communal, ideal. Even on its own terms, this ideal is fatally compromised by an access system that is impenetrable to all but the initiated. The Wikipedia restaurant has many many chefs in the kitchen; you want to be cautious when you dine there.