Should I stop writing blog posts and just edit Wikipedia?

Vanity and collective human endeavour

Image from the title page of the Encylopedia of D’Alembert and Diderot

As anyone who follows my Instagram will know, I am an enthusiastic attender of events. I particularly enjoy book launches. A book potentially condenses years of creative energy and I love watching an author emerge from their study, blinking at the light, to see how it fares in the world.

Katia Wengraf, owner of Mount Florida Books in Glasgow, has great taste in literature and often brings authors to her shop to do events. Whenever I get news of Katia's author events, I am always curious to learn more about them, to see what they've published and whether they are worth checking out. Essentially, I want a simple Wikipedia page about them with a list of their books and a brief biography. Is that too much to ask? Well...

On two occasions, I searched for the authors and found nothing on Wikipedia. These are writers who had books out by reputable publishers and had received accolades. But there was nothing, not even a stub. Fortunately, Wikipedia is editable by anyone. Even me. Even you. Try it now. Go to a random page, click Edit, then add some text. If you publish your changes they will be available for the world to view, but please don't publish anything that isn't both useful and true.

The first time it happened was with Camilla Grudova. Despite being an accomplished author of two books she had no Wikipedia page. So I created a basic one, hoping that its contents would be added to by others. Within five minutes, a Donald Trump-supporting Wikipedian called for the page to be deleted. Thankfully, I had the time to add the references that Wikipedia uses to determine notability and it was saved.

A couple of months later, Grudova was named one of Granta’s 20 best young British novelists. When I looked at the Granta page I was shocked that many of the 2023 cohort didn't have a Wikipedia entry. Thanks to me, Grudova did. As, indeed, they all do now because of the efforts of Wikipedians.

Granta’s lists of best young British novelists, all with Wikipedia pages

When the journalist and author Chitra Ramaswamy was announced to appear at Mount Florida Books, I went through the same process: frustration at the omission, followed by quick page creation. This time, however, I didn't have time to save the page from those who wanted it deleted. I must confess that the page I created was partly based on publicity material, which is a huge red flag on Wikipedia. Anything that looks like advertising must be deleted and it was gone before I had the chance to fix it.

The attitude of the average Wikipedian, deluged by spam, is to delete and move on. They certainly don't have time to do the research and fix every page. Deletionism is an attempt to keep Wikipedia's standards high. There has to be some editorial control that says whether something is notable, otherwise the whole project could descend into spammy chaos.

But the deletionists sometimes go too far. Nicholson Baker has written about his battles with them:

I signed up for the Article Rescue Squadron, a small group that opposes "extremist deletion. […] Since about 1,500 articles are deleted a day, this kind of work can easily become life-consuming.

I understand that most people, myself included, are vain and want to express themselves, but wouldn’t it be great if we all created Wikipedia accounts and collectively improved the sum of human knowledge? A Wikipedia page can be improved by hundreds of people, updated regularly, checked for errors, linked to relevant articles, and viewed by billions.

Wikipedia has been around for a long time now, since 2001. For most people, it is part of the fabric of the modern world: they don't question how pages come into existence. They don't realise how important it is that ordinary people contribute. Every culture war topic is fiercely contested there because Wikipedia is seen as authoritative and neutral; it is the closest we come to a Ministry of Truth. It is hardly surprising, that someone like Johann Hari might create a pseudonymous account to attack critics and present himself as “one of the essential writers of our times”. Wikipedia is our historical record, a collective attempt at deciding what is worth remembering.

I recently built the website for Protests and Suffragettes, a group that often runs Wikipedia workshops to document feminist history. After talking with one of the activists about the politics of remembering, I decided to recreate my Chitra Ramaswamy page with original content and proper referencing. At the time of writing, my (or rather, our) Wikipedia page for her remains in place.