[The site is tackling more controversial edits, the results of
which can reverberate across the internet. ]
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THE CULTURE WARS LOOK DIFFERENT ON WIKIPEDIA  
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Noam Cohen
January 22, 2023
The Atlantic
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_ The site is tackling more controversial edits, the results of which
can reverberate across the internet. _

Wikipedia, by giulia.forsythe (CC0 1.0)

 

For more than 15 years, Wikipedia discussed
[[link removed]] what to call
the third child of Ernest Hemingway, a doctor who was born and wrote
books as Gregory, later lived as Gloria after undergoing
gender-affirming surgery, and, when arrested for public disorderliness
late in life, used a third name, Vanessa. Last year, editors on the
site finally settled the question: The Gregory Hemingway article was
deleted, and its contents were moved to a new one for Gloria
Hemingway [[link removed]]. This
would be her name going forward, and _she/her_ would be her pronouns.

Wikipedia’s billions of facts, rendered as dry prose in millions of
articles, help us understand the world. They are largely the brain
behind Siri and Alexa. They have been integrated as official
fact-checks
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conspiracy-theory YouTube videos. They helped train ChatGPT. So,
unsurprisingly, when you search Google for “Gregory Hemingway,”
[[link removed]] it
follows Wikipedia’s lead: You are told about Gloria instead.

In Wikipedia’s early days, the question of what to call Gloria
Hemingway would have been treated as a quick mission to locate a fact
in established publications such as _The New York Times_
[[link removed]].
Joseph Reagle, a Wikipedia expert at Northeastern University, told me
the site has an inherent “conservatism,” faithfully reporting
whatever secondary sources say about a subject. And at the time of
Hemingway’s death, in 2001, no major publication, including
the _Times_, called her Gloria.

But in recent years, something has begun to change. Wikipedia’s
editors are no longer simply citing dated sources; instead, they are
hashing out how someone would want to be understood. But even though
these deliberations touch on some of the most controversial issues
around—and reach conclusions that reverberate far beyond
Wikipedia’s pages—they are shockingly civil and thoughtful for the
internet today.

Read: Wikipedia, the last bastion of shared reality
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The breakthrough idea of Wikipedia was supposed to be its biggest
vulnerability. “The encyclopedia anyone can edit”
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open the gates to whoever had something to contribute, turning
Wikipedia into one of the most visited websites on the internet. But
who was to trust something “anyone” may have written? The site
definitely has inaccuracies; any student working on a research project
has gotten a spiel about how Wikipedia will lead them astray.

Of course, only a tiny percentage of Wikipedia’s visitors actually
take up the offer to contribute. There are campaigns to draw in new
editors, especially given that the existing ones skew heavily white
and male, but the most reliable motivation for getting involved seems
to be the urge to fix something wrong as opposed to create something
new. Articles typically start off small and stubby, perhaps even
inaccurate, and are steadily improved and corrected.

The desire to fix something wrong—in this case, articles that have
not kept up with the times—is meant to play out on an article’s
“Talk page,” a companion page dedicated to discussing edits. Take
the debate over Gregory versus Gloria. Last February, Hemingway’s
Talk page fielded a proposal on what name to use. There was a week of
debate, long discussions
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which a dozen or so editors grappled with how Hemingway would have
wanted to be perceived. The main advocate for moving the page from
Gregory to Gloria was an editor named TheTranarchist
[[link removed](R.E.:_Gloria_Hemingway)],
and the main opponent was an editor named StAnselm
[[link removed]], a self-described
Calvinist who has created more than 50 articles about biblical
characters and scenes. Yet the discussion on the Talk page was about
facts and Wikipedia policies and guidance, not politics. “It
didn’t seem culture warrior–ish,” Reagle said.

The discussion ended with a hung jury: seven editors for Gloria, seven
for Gregory. An experienced editor, Sceptre, stepped in and ordered
the article to be renamed. The decision was appealed, and an
administrator concluded that Sceptre had made a tough call that was
ultimately reasonable. On the biggest social-media sites, such a
decision might have descended into endless mudslinging. Instead,
everyone has respected the outcome and moved on. The article hasn’t
been touched in five months.

Exactly how these deliberations play out is different from article to
article, but what’s changed is that Wikipedia is no longer
automatically outsourcing the decision to a judgment of the past. The
point isn’t that Wikipedia has gone “woke.” Sometimes the
deliberations don’t lead to any fundamental changes at all.

That has been the case with the page for the late pioneering legal
scholar and Episcopal priest Pauli Murray
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has periodically
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pronoun fights from readers who want to right what they see as a
wrong. Murray used _she_ and _her_ in her own writings but, in
today’s terms, might have been considered nonbinary or a trans man.
As one conflicted editor wrote on the Talk page, “If Murray were
alive today, Murray would probably use he/him/his or they/them/their
pronouns. The question is do we have a right, or an obligation, to
apply these retroactively? Is it okay to be anachronistic
[[link removed]] in this matter? I do not
have answers to these questions, which is why I am calling attention
to this.” Wikipedia’s editors have begun grappling with tough,
even existential questions that might have traditionally been the
domain of historians rather than encyclopedias.

There has been a similar attempt to interrogate understandings of the
past by renaming the articles about a series of places whose names
contain _squaw_, including the California valley
[[link removed]] where
the 1960 Winter Olympics
[[link removed]] were held. On
occasion, editors would propose such a move, noting that _squaw_ is
considered a slur against Native Americans. Others would say that as
an encyclopedia meant to be helpful to people, Wikipedia should use
the most common name. “The Olympic Games of Squaw Valley” are
embalmed in the past, they argued, so how can the name “Squaw
Valley” be removed?

In September, when the federal government said it would begin the
process of officially scrubbing _squaw_ from place names, a
proposal to rename the article
[[link removed]] about
the California valley succeeded. Case closed. But take a look at the
Talk page, and you’ll find a level of discussion that more resembles
the collegiality of a workplace than a network of unpaid online
commentators. The experienced editor who concluded that the community
favored renaming the article confessed that he had been a bit confused
by the issue. “Forgive me,” he wrote
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“but just as I fail to understand other forms of ethnic slur, I am
hard-pressed to make out why Native Americans would consider the
naming of anything, a valley, a town, a waterfall, anything, after the
general term for ‘spouse’ would be indigestible. If it were called
‘Spouse Valley’ or ‘Wife Valley’ I don’t think any ethnic
slur would be sensed by anybody … Would really appreciate any light
that is shed on this subject!”

Wikipedia has long represented a fundamentally unique form of
information production—it isn’t credentials based, or top-down
like _Britannica_. That’s not to say that it’s perfect; the site
has all the secret hierarchies, obscure rules, and confusion we’d
expect. At times, it has been a vector of misinformation. But as the
site takes on thornier edits, what it means to be a Wikipedia editor
is changing too. By wading into factual dilemmas instead of deferring
to secondary sources, editors have assumed a new level of authority.
The results will be choppy and contradictory; proposals for tweaks
will come from ordinary readers and editors who have been moved by
offense, and questions will be decided through deliberation, often
with great self-seriousness.

After all, these small decisions do have real consequences. Wikipedia
results spread across the internet, often influencing what we think of
as reality. “I don’t think any community project has as much reuse
and significance for the rest of the world that Wikipedia does,”
Reagle said. Indeed, Google “Squaw Valley
[[link removed]],”
and you don’t see the term at the very top. Google does, however,
suggest the question “Does Squaw Valley still exist?,” which it
answers with a Wikipedia excerpt explaining that it remains but that
the name has been changed “due to the derogatory connotations of the
word ‘squaw.’”

_Noam Cohen [[link removed]] is a
writer based in New York. He is the author of The Know-It-Alls: The
Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking
Ball. [[link removed]] Connect.
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