The Gnome

The Gnome is an amateur contributor to Wikipedia, on subjects that it pretends to know a little something about. The Gnome resides in a multifarious garden. Τhe expiration date is being moved up.

On Wikipedians: Hear, hear

In December 2023, Harper's magazine published an article by Ben Lerner about the perils and traps of Wikipedia editing. This letter, published in the February 2024 issue, addressed the issues raised in the article.

Ben Lerner’s winding tale about a man who deploys a phalanx of false accounts on Wikipedia in order to defy consensus brought to my mind the countless Wikipedians who have held tight to the pursuit of truth while the semi-fictional Lerner, by his own admission, lost his grip.

I have been a Wikipedia editor since 2019, and the mission of free knowledge has continuously motivated me to clean up vandalism and fill in the site’s informational gaps (as in articles pertaining to local politicians, emerging comedians, and extinct cousins of the platypus). With each keystroke, my fellow editors and I have contributed to the largest and most accessible—albeit still imperfect—source of information humans have ever had.

Take the software engineer in Washington who has corrected the grammatically incorrect phrase “comprised of” about ninety thousand times, the librarian in Alberta who doggedly patrols for copyright violations, or the California product manager who guards pages against content that glorifies Nazis. One teenager spent hours each day editing articles about the 472 subway stations in New York City until every one of them had a comprehensive entry. A white-haired retiree I know spends his days cycling around the Tri-State Area, taking freely licensed photographs of infrastructure, and sometimes letting me tag along.

Though some of Wikipedia’s contributors manipulate the platform, just as Lerner’s avatar did in his worst moments, the vast majority of us are shrewd, delightful, and ordinary people operating in achingly good faith.

Abrahamic update: policy trumps passion

Well, this was an unexpected and quite welcome turn of events. Let's hope for more of the same. Wikipedia, especially, in these times, needs a neutral point of view by editors. (4 April 2024)