But that's not where Wikipedia comes from. It comes from editors, who are volunteers that add missing topics, update pages when new things happen, and settle debates ranging from grammar ticks to deep philosophy. Author Stephen Harrison has written about these people for Slate, WIRED, The Guardian, and The New York Times. Now, he's exploring the distinctive lives, interests, and conflicts of this tribe in a fiction tome, The Editors.
The Editors follows Morgan Wentworth, a recently laid-off journalist who scopes out a freelance story at a global conference for the book's Wiki stand-in, Infopendium. Wentworth sees the breadth of ages, personalities, and motivations among the editors and comes to appreciate their dedication. Then, a hacker breaks in, posts a cryptic message, and triggers Wentworth's expanding investigation into a global struggle over truth and information.
I spoke with Harrison about his work writing about Wikipedia, his approach to fiction as a tool for exploring the humans behind the site, where he thinks Wikipedia is now, and where it might be headed. The interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
Ars: Out of everything in Wikipedia that you've written about, what made you want to explore the people, The Editors?
Harrison: I was kind of reporting on what the editors are doing or deciding upon, the debates they're having. But there's something about fiction—one of the strengths is that you can get inside the characters' heads. And I just thought that fiction was the best vehicle for that. …
I also just always saw the Internet encyclopedia as being inherently suspenseful. You never know who the people are behind the information, right? It's like this great unmasking; you see the username, but then you actually meet the person, and you learn about them. So, I had that model in the back of my head, and it informed my writing of the book. (...)
Ars: You talked with Caitlin Dewey (of Links I Would Gchat You) about the different eras of Wikipedia. I'm wondering, since last summer, if you sense anything has changed about Wikipedia's direction, new challenges for the big ol' encyclopedia?
Harrison: I guess I would say it's [in] a little bit of an "existential threat phase." So, okay, if we have all this AI technology, do we even need Wikipedia anymore? I would argue that we do. One, because we need a data set, or a sort of central text, to train the LLMs. That's the way these LLMs work is they need a central text on which they learn, and Wikipedia is a big part of the training data, but it doesn't maintain itself; you do need people to write it.
Ars: Wikipedia is this perfect corpus of human-written text, full of human language about things that humans are interested in…
Harrison: And publicly licensed, too. It's not perfect, but it's a pretty clean data set in a lot of ways. And so I guess the existential threat is, if Wikipedia is not getting appropriately credited, will we forget about it and then stop maintaining it, and then will it no longer be as valuable a resource to both humans and AI?
Ars: You're writing about volunteer editors, their personalities, their pride, motivations. Do you think it affects the editors behind Wikipedia if they get a sense they're mostly writing for bots, for AI and Google to just summarize for searchers? Do you have any sense of whether editors care about the way they're feeding people information?
Harrison: It's a bit nuanced because Wikipedia editors aren't the most egotistical people. They're largely anonymous or writing behind pseudonyms. They're not like TikTok stars who are trying to get their name out there. So in a way, they were never trying to claim credit for their edits and contributions to Wikipedia. So you could make the argument that because they're relatively selfless, maybe it doesn't matter if the data is going to AI or LLMs.
On the other hand, just from having talked to a lot of Wikipedia editors, they are very thoughtful of the reader. They envision a reader, and a lot of them are thinking about: Does this serve the reader? And I also think just a lot of them are put off by the idea that their work is just a big gift to Google, a for-profit company.
… It's also a hard issue that I'm grappling with because what is the fix? Maybe it's like, okay, these Big Tech companies are getting so much value from Wikipedia, maybe they should just donate more money to the Wikimedia Foundation. On the other hand, you don't want the Big Tech companies to have any influence over the encyclopedia. So it's not just that we want the big companies to reciprocate and influence the whole thing. It's challenging.
Ars: It's always fascinating to me how, by and large, every page is so much better than I think it will be. Really high-energy, maybe "truth optional" pages for topics like cryptocurrencies. It's a small miracle that they're as orderly and reasonable as they end up being. Do you have any thoughts on how, 24 years from now, Wikipedia has been able to maintain that kind of stability?
Harrison: Well, there are a lot of dedicated volunteers. If a page is getting a lot of eyeballs, like cryptocurrency, for example, that's a page that people are going to be monitoring with some vigilance. With the mobile revolution, people are also watching edits on their phones and can run back to their laptops to revert incorrect edits.
(Harrison mentioned an article he wrote for The Outline about a Czech grandpa who largely oversaw the cryptocurrency page.)
Coming up on the 24th anniversary, I want to give a salute to the longtime contributors while also acknowledging that Wikipedia has been recruiting new people. And I hope that, even with AI and all these other potential threats, Wikipedia is still recruiting these people.
Because it really is a relatively small group of people. Everyone can edit, of course, but in English, it's been found that there are only about 1,500 core contributors—pretty small overall. So one of the things in the book is characters discovering, oh, it feels kind of like a small community. People tend to know each other by usernames. That's a little bit of art imitating life, because people start to see the same usernames on Wikipedia or come across each other on the same pages, and then develop a bit of a reputation. And that, obviously, inspired me.
The Editors follows Morgan Wentworth, a recently laid-off journalist who scopes out a freelance story at a global conference for the book's Wiki stand-in, Infopendium. Wentworth sees the breadth of ages, personalities, and motivations among the editors and comes to appreciate their dedication. Then, a hacker breaks in, posts a cryptic message, and triggers Wentworth's expanding investigation into a global struggle over truth and information.
I spoke with Harrison about his work writing about Wikipedia, his approach to fiction as a tool for exploring the humans behind the site, where he thinks Wikipedia is now, and where it might be headed. The interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
Ars: Out of everything in Wikipedia that you've written about, what made you want to explore the people, The Editors?
Harrison: I was kind of reporting on what the editors are doing or deciding upon, the debates they're having. But there's something about fiction—one of the strengths is that you can get inside the characters' heads. And I just thought that fiction was the best vehicle for that. …
I also just always saw the Internet encyclopedia as being inherently suspenseful. You never know who the people are behind the information, right? It's like this great unmasking; you see the username, but then you actually meet the person, and you learn about them. So, I had that model in the back of my head, and it informed my writing of the book. (...)
Ars: You talked with Caitlin Dewey (of Links I Would Gchat You) about the different eras of Wikipedia. I'm wondering, since last summer, if you sense anything has changed about Wikipedia's direction, new challenges for the big ol' encyclopedia?
Harrison: I guess I would say it's [in] a little bit of an "existential threat phase." So, okay, if we have all this AI technology, do we even need Wikipedia anymore? I would argue that we do. One, because we need a data set, or a sort of central text, to train the LLMs. That's the way these LLMs work is they need a central text on which they learn, and Wikipedia is a big part of the training data, but it doesn't maintain itself; you do need people to write it.
Ars: Wikipedia is this perfect corpus of human-written text, full of human language about things that humans are interested in…
Harrison: And publicly licensed, too. It's not perfect, but it's a pretty clean data set in a lot of ways. And so I guess the existential threat is, if Wikipedia is not getting appropriately credited, will we forget about it and then stop maintaining it, and then will it no longer be as valuable a resource to both humans and AI?
Ars: You're writing about volunteer editors, their personalities, their pride, motivations. Do you think it affects the editors behind Wikipedia if they get a sense they're mostly writing for bots, for AI and Google to just summarize for searchers? Do you have any sense of whether editors care about the way they're feeding people information?
Harrison: It's a bit nuanced because Wikipedia editors aren't the most egotistical people. They're largely anonymous or writing behind pseudonyms. They're not like TikTok stars who are trying to get their name out there. So in a way, they were never trying to claim credit for their edits and contributions to Wikipedia. So you could make the argument that because they're relatively selfless, maybe it doesn't matter if the data is going to AI or LLMs.
On the other hand, just from having talked to a lot of Wikipedia editors, they are very thoughtful of the reader. They envision a reader, and a lot of them are thinking about: Does this serve the reader? And I also think just a lot of them are put off by the idea that their work is just a big gift to Google, a for-profit company.
… It's also a hard issue that I'm grappling with because what is the fix? Maybe it's like, okay, these Big Tech companies are getting so much value from Wikipedia, maybe they should just donate more money to the Wikimedia Foundation. On the other hand, you don't want the Big Tech companies to have any influence over the encyclopedia. So it's not just that we want the big companies to reciprocate and influence the whole thing. It's challenging.
Ars: It's always fascinating to me how, by and large, every page is so much better than I think it will be. Really high-energy, maybe "truth optional" pages for topics like cryptocurrencies. It's a small miracle that they're as orderly and reasonable as they end up being. Do you have any thoughts on how, 24 years from now, Wikipedia has been able to maintain that kind of stability?
Harrison: Well, there are a lot of dedicated volunteers. If a page is getting a lot of eyeballs, like cryptocurrency, for example, that's a page that people are going to be monitoring with some vigilance. With the mobile revolution, people are also watching edits on their phones and can run back to their laptops to revert incorrect edits.
(Harrison mentioned an article he wrote for The Outline about a Czech grandpa who largely oversaw the cryptocurrency page.)
Coming up on the 24th anniversary, I want to give a salute to the longtime contributors while also acknowledging that Wikipedia has been recruiting new people. And I hope that, even with AI and all these other potential threats, Wikipedia is still recruiting these people.
Because it really is a relatively small group of people. Everyone can edit, of course, but in English, it's been found that there are only about 1,500 core contributors—pretty small overall. So one of the things in the book is characters discovering, oh, it feels kind of like a small community. People tend to know each other by usernames. That's a little bit of art imitating life, because people start to see the same usernames on Wikipedia or come across each other on the same pages, and then develop a bit of a reputation. And that, obviously, inspired me.
by Kevin Purdy, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image: Inkshares
