On becoming a Wikipedian

 

Original photograph: Large room of the ‘Escher x nendo’ show called ‘Between Two Worlds’, held between December 2018 and April 2019 at the National Gallery of Victoria.

 The other night I attended a zoom training session for novice Wikipedians. They are the editors who create the phantasmagorical online encyclopedia from airy nothing, make minute corrections, (Oxford comma) and spend hours ‘scraping’. We were told by the Wikipedagogue, a word I just invented and probably should patent immediately, there are 381,000 active editors at present, and that’s just on the English language Wikipedia. This is but a fraction of those who visit the behemoth each day, Wikipedia being the fifth biggest website in the World. 

We were introduced to different types of long-serving Wikipedians. For example, there is the man with a bee in his bonnet about the use of ‘comprise’. He has warrant. H. W. Fowler himself says the “lamentably common use of ‘comprise’ as a synonym of ‘compose’ or ‘constitute’ is a wanton and indefensible weakening of our vocabulary.” Our editor spends days correcting wrong sentence constructions put together by hapless Wikipedians who seem not to know if ‘comprise’ refers to the whole or parts of something. Some would describe his behaviour as helpful, others as quixotic. This kind of personal mission though is not why any of us were at the zoom class, even if we’re sticklers for grammar. 

We were told that the editorial essentials comprise the following: it is an online encyclopedia; entries have a neutral point of view and are factual; the content is free; it does not have firm rules; and Wikipedians interact in a respectful and civil manner. This last point might be assumed, but as the internet lacks rules of etiquette, may be necessary. For every impeccable compiler of comprehensive facts on the given subject, we could encounter a sensitivity reader, blinkered historian, (Oxford comma) or vengeful cousin of the subject. Everything in entries must be suitable for the public domain (no copyright), so must be suitably rewritten; everything is referenced. 

All of that sounds simple enough. The hard anonymous work begins collecting material on the subject of our entry. This includes, but doesn’t comprise, the aforementioned ‘scraping’. Those of us used to this being what corrupt ex-presidents do with the bottom of the barrel, must adjust to its meaning as the extraction of vast masses of data on websites and copying into other documents and spreadsheets. We gaze at the prospect of ‘scraping’ for a living, even though the work is voluntary, with results that comprise but a formal fraction of the facts ‘scraped’. It dawned on us why the 19,000 articles devised in the first year of Wikipedia (2001), have increased to 6 million by February of this year. After one hour, armed with our own password, we could thus commence our verbal re-arrangement of reality. If we are not side-tracked by our firm belief in the Oxford comma, and the compulsion to add it to every article not currently correct in that respect.

 Report by Philip Harvey