User:Sgerbic/Book review of The Editors
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The Editors
The Editors by Stephen Harrison, 412 pp.
Published by Inkshares, August 13, 2024
ISBN:9781950301676, 1950301672
- Sgerbic leads the editing group Guerrilla Skeptics on Wikipedia and was interviewed twice by Harrison, the journalist who is the author of the book. Disclosure: she received an advanced copy of the book for review.
An announcement came across my desktop recently that Slate magazine journalist Stephen Harrison had published a book called The Editors. His beat is Wikipedia (yes that is a thing), so I was a bit surprised he would be writing about Wikipedia editors, but hadn’t reached out to interview my team members. Harrison knows about the Guerrilla Skeptics on Wikipedia (GSoW) project, as he has interviewed me twice, most recently in 2023 for this article, “Why Wikipedia is So Tough on Bigfoot”. To my surprise I received an email from Harrison a few weeks ago asking if I would be interested in an advance copy of his book, and of course I would! Keeping my ego in check and not asking why he didn’t interview any of my amazing editors for a book about Wikipedia editors, I gave him my home address and soon I received a paperback advance reader copy. I found a sunny spot on the couch, the obligatory cats joined me and I settled in to see whom Harrison had chosen to interview. Caution: some vague mild spoilers are contained below.
I was surprised to learn that this is not a book interviewing Wikipedia editors, it is a novel about a group of editors who seek to keep misinformation off the 4th most viewed website, Infopedium, this group, called The Misinformation Patrol. Sound familiar?
With my three cats taking turns keeping me warm and settled on the couch, I finished the 414 pages mostly in one 5-hour reading session, yes it was just that good. And completely not what I was expecting. It’s Infopedium and not Wikipedia. Harrison selected new tenets, “Aim for Neutrality”, “We Need Better Sources”, “Anonymity Is Fundamental” and “Keep Developing” changing from Wikipedia’s five pillars, “Wikipedia is an encyclopedia... written from a neutral point of view... free content... respect and civility, and most important and yet confusingly frustrating at times “Wikipedia has no firm rules”. You can read them here: Five pillars.
Everything else was very familiar. Discussions, edit history, administrator elections, ambiguous rules, conflict of interest issues, sock-puppets, paid editing problems, conventions, and edit-a-thons. But more than this, what Harrison really understood was the passion of the editing community, he has clearly been talking to real people.
The novel centers around Alex718 who runs The Disinformation Patrol and the journalist Morgan Wentworth (who is clearly Harrison’s alter ego) and the uncovering of a paid editing mystery of a billionaire Pierce Briggs who treats Infopedium as an extension of his media empire and seeks to control articles to protect his reputation and to influence the public. Briggs understands the power of Wikipedia... er Infopedium I mean. The story introduces other editors with their own agendas, DejaNu who is a librarian whose mission is to create articles for women and people of color, though an important effort, she is one of those “the ends justify the means” people who will bend the rules in order to right wrongs of the past. And to a community of people hellbent on following rules, DejaNu is a polarizing character (I didn’t like her at all). Another editor, turtle~dragon who has moved from Texas to China and started a business editing for pay, moves the storyline along. He begins working for Briggs, using sock-puppet accounts to influence articles, until the Chinese government finds out and forces him to cover-up a novel illness appearing in Wuhan.
And this is where Harrison’s expertise with Wikipedia really shows, a crowd-sourced all volunteer community can’t be stopped from its mission. Infopendium or Wikipedia. The idea of writing an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit is just insane, it should not exist, it should be a mess, it can’t possibly maintain itself without ads and masses of paid employees! Yet it does, and it thrives, issues with the software and head-butting with other editors notwithstanding, it works.
I saw the story of the fictional freelance journalist Morgan Wentworth, who out of desperation for a story attends a Infopendium convention at Columbia University in New York, and the other cast of characters Harrison develops as reflections of the Wikipedia editors he has interviewed over the years for Slate, VICE Sports, Washington Post, New York Times, OneZero and others. A good chunk of his published articles are storylines in this novel, very clever. When in the novel the editors turtle~dragon and KonaYeziq get wrapped up in censorship in Beijing, Uyghurs are sent to camps, and then there are the beginnings of a novel virus that the Chinese government tried to cover up, I knew Harrison’s articles “The Coronavirus is Stress-Testing Wikipedia’s Systems", “Why China Blocked Wikipedia in All Languages” and “Why Wikipedia Banned Several Chinese Admins” were necessary research.
Character DejaNu, the librarian who wins the Editor of the Year award for her unwavering tenacity to right the wrongs of the past. Politically correcting articles to current standards, encouraging new editors to join the editing ranks, probably came from Harrison’s articles “How Wikipedia Became a Battleground for Racial Justice” and “Closing Wikipedia’s Gender Gap”. Character Alex718, whose unhygienic habits and fanatical obsession with Infopedium editing, starting at age seven to create articles for trains and public transit, is probably based on this story Harrison wrote: “Wikipedia’s Terrific Subway Railfans” about editors Ryan Ng and Shaul Picker, who have made hundreds of thousands of edits to Wikipedia, mostly about New York’s subways.
Harrison begins the novel with several pages of edit history for the billionaire Pierce Briggs article that introduces the cast of editors, which will set them on a spiral of intrigue to unmask who is behind the edits that are seeking to control information and spread misinformation. Personally I found this an intriguing way to begin, maybe it’s just me, but as I read the back-and-forth of the edits, I found myself in editor mode thinking how I would have handled some of these edits myself. It was quite realistic.
Though the characters do become a bit of a caricature of an obsessive Wikipedia editor with a savior complex – think lots of missed meals, lack of relationships and days without showering – Harrison understands the passion, desire to be fair and neutral, rule-following, with free-information-to-the-masses attitude that I see in the Wikipedia editing community. It shows that Harrison has done his homework. At the end of the novel the heroes of the story, who start out with many different agendas, find that they all share the same agenda. The storyline is fun, there is mystery and intrigue and the characters’ individual stories and agendas seem plausible. I’m not giving away too much, there are many twists and mysteries for even the non-Wikipedia editor to enjoy.
Coming back to GSoW for the moment, the group in the novel, the Misinformation Patrol, focused on general problems with all articles, was made up of experienced editors who were recruited to join the Patrol and were operating anonymously with each other on Infopedium. Very different from the GSoW – we specialize in articles on science and pseudoscience. We also have created our own training program (generally takes 4 months to complete), operate in many languages, and we are gathered off-Wikipedia in a private Facebook group called "The Secret Cabal" which allows us to know each other in real life. What Harrison is describing is more akin to Wikipedia Projects, which exist all over Wikipedia but are repositories of ranked lists of things to do, and are mostly dormant. Good intentions, but in my opinion, the anonymity of the users and the lack of mentorship and leadership are what kill these projects. GSoW not only trains one-on-one, but about half of our new people have never coded or worked in IT; we shun wall-of-text instructions and give lots of personalized feedback and mentoring. It’s a different “vibe” which hopefully will keep us focused on our goals of making the best encyclopedia – the same goal that Harrison’s characters have with Infopedium.
One of Harrisons storylines is with a paid editor scheme from the viewpoint of a paid editor falling victim to the person paying for the edit. Personally I have dealt with several cases of someone in real life paying for an edit, then being blackmailed for more money to protect the edits from being removed. Something I warn professionals of often, there is really no shortcut to having a Wikipedia article written about you, it stands on its own or not, money paid or special favors aren’t going to help. Also different was the “training” that DejaNu tried to do at her library, which is something I suspect happens at Edit-A-Thons. Brand new editors creating brand new Wikipedia articles in a couple hours with little instruction. Although I suspect this happens, it is not how I run my team, we start with minor edits and after much instruction over weeks and many small changes build up to a rewriting a stub article; never ever would we instruct someone new to create a brand new article in a few hours.
Overall, this is a fun read, with a very interesting sub-text and very well researched. I suspect Harrison would love to thumb his nose at a tennis-playing billionaire who treats Wikipedia as his own social network, and travel across country in a Scooby-doopedia Mystery Machine to uncover who is behind the misinformation. I wonder how Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales – if reading this novel – would think of his character Gerald Budd’s home in Palo Alto with “half-eaten microwavable meals covering the coffee table” and “(T)iny gray hairs fram[ing] the drain of the bathroom sink, clinging stubbornly to the porcelain surface”. But as I’ve never met Wales I don’t know, maybe he would get a good laugh out of it?
Just for the fun of it, if he created characters and storylines from the people he has interviewed over the years, which of these characters might I have influenced? On page 34 while Morgan Wentworth is walking past a series of editors she over hears these two conversations, first a man in a fedora who says, “If a page presents false balance, that actually undermines the truth” and a woman with a French accent who says, “We cannot return to the past and compose ‘better sources’ for those people who lacked power”. If you blend those two random editors and add in a lot of imposter syndrome that someone like me could be running a project like GSoW, I think Harrison has me figured out. Plus my pure joy of training new editors.
Harrison’s The Editors and my GSoW project have more in common than not, we both revere this important encyclopedia, remove misinformation, admire journalists, respect the pillars of editing and the editors themselves. Hopefully this review inspires you to pick up a copy.
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