She says the people who are most excited to meet her are the ones who use Wikipedia every day, but the ones who give her frosty looks are those who have the highest public profile. She recalls sitting next to two distinguished female scientists at a recent conference. ‘I introduced myself, and very often in a context like that it’s “Oh, another woman who’s going to be a speaker and that’s fantastic.” So I say I run the foundation that runs Wikipedia. And the first thing I heard was, “We don’t like our articles.” One of the things they reflected on was, “Look, my body of work has changed dramatically since the article was first written, and it hasn’t kept up to date with my newest thinking in the area.” And that’s a very legitimate concern.’
But at least they had an entry, which was not the case with Canadian scientist Donna Strickland. On 2 October 2018, Strickland was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for her work on chirped pulse amplification, something that may have a direct bearing on the future of eye surgery and other medical laser applications. But good luck trying to find more information on her on Wikipedia the day after the announcement. Her absence became a cause célèbre. There had been an entry prepared about her, but it was rejected on the grounds of insufficient references from secondary sources. That is to say, because she was only famous in the world of physics, and had not previously been written about in the popular media, she then couldn’t be written about in the world’s most popular encyclopaedia.
No one was keener to point out the anomaly than Maher. Soon after Strickland’s entry finally appeared, Maher blogged that as of the beginning of October 2019, only 17.82 per cent of Wikipedia’s biographies were about women. She is proud that women gather frequently for day-long ‘editathons’ to improve this figure, and flags up the site’s recent focus on improving and expanding articles concerning women’s health and the history of the black diaspora. This is not merely a worthy ambition; it is regarded as crucial to Wikipedia’s global standing. Maher has a neat phrase for another cultural imbalance: ‘Too many articles on battleships, not enough on poetry.’
Conversely, Maher says there is a ‘whole industry’ based upon changing existing Wikipedia profiles from people who don’t like what’s written about them. It’s considered ‘black hat editing’, and the community really gets upset by it. ‘We encourage people not to do it, because usually you’ll get caught, and when you do get caught white-washing your own Wikipedia page it’s not a good look. We always tell elected officials this.’
Even Boris Johnson seemed to grasp the difficulty. In June 2020, referring to the destruction of statues of dishonoured men, he columnised thus: ‘If we start purging the record and removing the images of all but those whose attitudes conform to our own, we are engaged in a great lie, a distortion of our history, like some public figure furtively trying to make themselves look better by editing their own Wikipedia entry.’ Was I the only one to think he was writing from experience?
Between our two chats, Maher had attended a Zoom board meeting that sounded like every other board meeting: performance reviews, financial shortfalls, expansion or the lack of it. But then there were more specific issues: how to celebrate Wikipedia’s twentieth anniversary in January, and continuing discussions about the impact of small screens on people’s ability to absorb content and make edits. Does this inevitably mean less deep reading, or does it vastly increase accessibility? Both. Between March and May 2020, 43 per cent of users accessed Wikipedia on a computer, and 57 per cent on a phone.
Wikipedia’s mobile app is a fascinating thing in itself, not least its article randomiser. This is an addictive lucky dip through millions of its pages: you click on a dice symbol and you get a nice way to spend a minute or a day. On one occasion it threw up the following, in the following order: Peters’s wrinkle-lipped bat; Roads in Northern Ireland; Eddie Izzard Live at the Ambassadors; Proper palmar digital nerves of median nerve [nerves in the palm of your hand]; Vincenz Fettmilch [early seventeenth-century gingerbread maker]; Herman Myhrberg [Swedish footballer who played in the 1912 Olympics]; List of Guangzhou Metro stations; Hand Cut [1983 album by Bucks Fizz]; Methyl isothiocyanate [chemical compound responsible for tears]; and Lusty Lady [defunct peep show establishment in Seattle which once boasted a marquee wishing passers-by ‘Happy Spanksgiving’].
The thing that set Wikipedia apart from everything else that had fired the digital world over the past three decades – Google and other search engines, Facebook and other social media – was that Wikipedia’s code wasn’t new; all the software and hardware already existed and was being made use of elsewhere.
What distinguished Wikipedia was – as sappy as it sounds – a belief in humanity and the triumph of good behaviour over bad. There were other things too, including a commitment to information sharing, a celebration of specialisation and exactitude, and a deep and fundamental acknowledgement of the value of accumulated learning.
The very first home page, composed at 19.27 GMT on 15 January 2001, stated:
This is the new WikiPedia!
Its creator, Office.bomis.com, made the first edit twenty-three minutes later, adding a list of subjects WikiPedia should contain. ‘Foundational disciplines’ included Philosophy and Logic, Mathematics and Statistics. Natural Sciences included Physics, Chemistry, Astronomy, Earth Sciences, Biology, Botany and Zoology. There were also to be sections on Social Sciences, Applied Arts, Urban Planning, Aerospace Technology, Classics, Performing Arts, Religion and Recreation, the last category including Sports, Games, Hobbies and Tourism.
The following day at 19.00, Office.bomis.com created a mission statement:
This is the new WikiPedia! The idea here is to write a complete encyclopedia from scratch, without peer review process, etc. Some people think that this may be a hopeless endeavor, that the result will necessarily suck. We aren’t so sure. So, let’s get to work!
Just over an hour later, the page received its first edit from an external contributor, Eiffel.demon.co.uk, who made a few small changes to the priority and presentation of the subject list, and added the topics Air Transport, Rail Transport, Road Transport and Sea Transport.
And the day after that, just after midnight on 17 January 2001, user Dhcp058.246.lvcm.com, who was evidently connected to the project, elaborated on the mission statement, added some links, and rallied the troops:
This is the new WikiPedia! The idea here is to write a complete encyclopedia from scratch, collaboratively. Add a page, come back tomorrow, look what others have added, and then add some more. We think this might be fun …
The links included
WhatIsaWiki?
WhatsaWikiFor?
WhyOnEarthWouldIWantToContributeToaWiki?
The new entry ended with a forceful announcement.
This wiki is an experiment. But, for those who might be confused about this point, it is not Nupedia. Nupedia is a serious encyclopedia project found at http://www.nupedia.com. This wiki is a proposed ‘fun’ supplement to Nupedia!
Its founders Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger would subsequently fall out over several issues, not least factors surrounding the protocols of the reliability of entries. Sanger departed in 2002, and four years later formed his own knowledge website Citizendium, designed as a more rigorously fact-checked and peer-reviewed site than Wikipedia. Although launched with much publicity, and an initial burst of activity, the project soon lost momentum.*
By the end of its first year, Wikipedia had approximately 20,000 articles, including many entries on the original subject list, and many that would not have been included in more traditional encyclopaedias. Some of the earliest articles took for their subject matter the American philosopher William Alston, the singer Fiona Apple, the slapstick silent film director Mack Sennett, the civil rights activist Rosa Parks, a list of the amendments in the US Constitution, a full list of the characters and locations in the novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, details about the number of people in the Algerian military, a definition of oligopoly, a description of duopoly, the French actress Leslie Caron, and a list of female tennis players. Because its creators were also its readers, from the outset it reflected a world as varied as the interests of its inhabitants. In the first few weeks there were also articles on the meaning of the word Machiavellian, the postage stamp, a track listing of the album Horses by Patti Smith, a description of uric acid, and a brief biography of the soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. The randomness reflected the joy of the blank page: ‘We’re tiny and new, so Just Write anything!’ Twenty years later it has become very difficult to find anything that doesn’t have an entry.