Lessons from my brief stint as a Wikipedian
But maybe I should say: once a Wikipedian, always a Wikipedian.
It’s been years since I fell down the rabbit hole, and yesterday, I almost did. I clicked on the Talk tab at the top of on the page for Lee Iacocca, since I am working on a poem about him. In the tab, old and new debates were happening among editors, including one who claimed that the Dodge Caravan is important enough to have its own lede. Sadly for that editor, the Caravan is not prominent on the current page, but this is the beauty and brutality of Wikipedia.
As embarrassing as it is to admit, I actually fell for Wikipedia while writing about the Restoring Honor rally, in 2010. To refresh your memory, the event captured the ire of civil rights leaders when Glenn Beck scheduled the rally at the Lincoln Memorial.
As the rally unfolded, the first pressing issue was to address fairly the debate over crowd size, which varied widely in the media. I had my own point of view on the event, but I also became obsessed with contributing balanced coverage. It must be the latent journalist in me. I remember that my husband and I had just moved into a tiny apartment in Chicago and I didn’t leave my laptop for possibly twelve hours, slowly learning the ropes of Wikipedia and feeling the rush of documenting history.
Most of my writing and edits were reverted almost immediately, often with well-thought-out rationale.
I didn’t know at the time that while Wikipedia is democratic and invites anyone to edit, a very small group of extremely experienced editors, including a remarkable guy named Steven Pruitt, vet everything under stringent guidelines. Ah, the sting of rejection, but also the sweet pull to keep going, to shape what exactly would remain there, potentially forever (perhaps a year, or some other long time in internet terms).
Looking over the page now, it’s unclear if anything I wrote or edited “made it.” But in retrospect, it doesn’t matter. The brief yet immersive experience of walking through a sandstorm and looking backward to watch my footprints get wiped out taught me so much, including how invaluable Wikipedia is. I started encouraging my students to use it to start their research projects, and many were shocked, as they had just graduated high school and had been forbidden to use it.
I also learned some things about the writing process:
It’s fun (and sometimes intimidating and frustrating and addictive) to collaborate on writing.
Editing Wikipedia was all of the above to me, almost simultaneously. They say six thousand people visit the site every second, so maybe that breakneck speed had something to do with it. Today, whether I am working with an academic to sharpen their monograph or taking feedback on my own writing, it’s thrilling to know writing can reach new heights when it’s done together.
Stakes keep writing exciting.
I now see the absurdity of being so committed to doing edits on a real-time event when other subjects are much more pressing: there are lists upon lists of topics in dire need of development. But all in all, I think the experience was a lesson in how important consequence is to the writing process, and also how important it is to gain constant critique and feedback. Even with the most mundane blog post (self-referential here), an audience needs to be imagined and a heady result dreamed up.
There is no such thing as Truth with a capital “T,” but it’s worthwhile to aim for it.
This is a fun topic and I won’t go far with it, but I think editing Wikipedia spurred my obsession with precision, especially in relation to diction and connotation. It’s lovely how Wikipedia provides a rhetorical framework that demands such fidelity, as we are aiming to write a real-deal encyclopedia, but obviously any writing task will want to aspire similarly, on some scale. For instance, in something I am editing right now, I suggested that the word “jumped” sounded too positive when placed within the context of the author’s argument.
I never thought of a jump that way, but there I was—I proposed “dodged” instead.
