At 23.17, in what would be his last contribution to his new page that day, The Anome added a photograph showing the words ‘Thank You NHS’ displayed on an electronic billboard in Leeds. And then he went to bed; his creation had been logged on Wikipedia’s hard drive as Page ID 64695292.
The following morning, at 10.23, he corrected the typo ‘outrside their homes’ to ‘outside their homes’.
Other editors made additional changes over the coming days, including a destructive move by someone assigned the user number 95.149.192.174. This user added the phrase ‘Complete bollocks’ to the introduction. It took less than a minute for a bot patrolling Wikipedia to remove it, and to bring it to the attention of human administrators. The bot – a software ‘robot’ programmed to perform repetitive tasks that would be too tedious to perform manually – was called ClueBot NG and was created specifically to root out vandalism and to aid Operation Enduring Encyclopaedia, one of the site’s many mission statements. According to the bot’s own page on Wikipedia it makes ‘Over 9,000’ such edits per minute, most of them correcting the work of malicious bots intent on spoiling. Although ‘over 9,000’ is not, by Wikipedia’s standards, a usefully accurate figure – the amount is more of a phrase than a number, denoting something unfeasibly large – one thing was clear: in the quest for truth and learning, Wikipedia faced a newly destructive dilemma: bot versus bot. This was a problem Encyclopaedia Britannica never had to face. Open access lays bare a wide and varied community: like the NHS, it is free at the point of entry.
Over the next six weeks, The Anome added several pictures to ‘Thank You NHS’ and continued to tweak it as the real-life story developed. And then he moved on, shifting his gaze to other topics, including the intricate explanation of ‘Turingery’, the manual code-breaking method devised by Alan Turing at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, to which he made more than twenty small changes.
Among the many behavioural guidelines circulated to experienced editors on Wikipedia is a gentle reminder to ‘Please do not bite the newcomers’. The text is accompanied by a photo of a large dog with a cat in its mouth.
‘Nothing scares potentially valuable contributors away faster than hostility,’ the message begins. ‘It is very unlikely for a newcomer to be completely familiar with Wikipedia’s markup language and its myriad of policies, guidelines, and community standards when they start editing.’
The message reminds editors that many of their first contributions were probably ‘unencyclopaedic’ in their nature, and yet slowly they learnt how to write according to house style. ‘Communicating with newcomers patiently and thoroughly is integral to ensure they stay on Wikipedia and ultimately contribute in a constructive manner.’
World experts and world amateurs: Wikimania in London in 2014
Newcomers to Wikipedia are its lifeblood. A study in 2006 suggested that the majority of substantive edits – new articles and lasting content – were contributed by those who weren’t long-term users and often weren’t registered on the site at alclass="underline" they knew something that others didn’t, or at least hadn’t thought to add, and then often they went away. More established users were more responsible for tweaking, reverting and rearranging content. Experienced editors were reminded that newly registered users were encouraged to be bold in their actions, and not to be thwarted by too many regulations and guidelines. ‘A newcomer brings a wealth of ideas, creativity and experience from other areas that, current rules and standards aside, have the potential to better our community and Wikipedia as a whole.’
Wikipedia’s suggestions carried the tone of the benign schoolteacher welcoming a child to a new class. ‘If a newcomer seems to have made a small mistake, e.g. forgot to put a book title in italics, correct it yourself but do not slam the newcomer. A gentle note on their user page explaining the Wikipedia standard and how to achieve it in the future may prove helpful, as they may be unfamiliar with the norm or merely how to achieve it … If you use bad manners or curse at newcomers, they may decide not to contribute again.’
Elsewhere the benevolent parent comes to mind. ‘If you feel that you must say something to a newcomer about a mistake, please do so in a constructive and respectful manner. Begin by introducing yourself with a greeting on the user’s talk page to let them know that they are welcomed here, and present your corrections calmly and as a peer. If possible, point out something they’ve done correctly or especially well. Do not call newcomers disparaging names such as “sockpuppet” or “meatpuppet”.’
‘We inevitably deal with a few difficult people,’ Wikipedia administrators tell their newest editors. ‘Some editors are only here to cause trouble, either by making destructive edits, by pushing an agenda, or by stirring up controversy. Others may believe so strongly that they are right that they are unable to edit collaboratively.’ Such people may be blocked or banned by higher powers on the site, but it is inadvisable to take matters into your own hands. Calling a spade a spade ‘can be a very bad idea,’ editors are told, as such conflict often leads to escalation.
The key is to correct or dispute the edits, not the editor. This advice is accompanied by a clever illusion, a drawing that sometimes looks like a duck and sometimes like a rabbit. It recalls the aphorism ‘If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck’. But ducks don’t know they are ducks. ‘A humane way to communicate with an anatid that you believe to be a duck would be to calmly inform it of its duck-like behaviour. Shouting “IT’S A DUCK” is likely to excite the duck, and it may quack at you, and when you’re in a shouting match with a duck, no one really wins.’ This note to editors contained underlined hypertext links for both ‘anatid’ and ‘quack’. Clicking on ‘quack’ takes you directly to the Wikipedia article entitled Anger.
Wikipedia is a very live thing. That is its beauty and occasional failing; it is humanity in all its forms. The project will not be finished until we are all finished, or until something destroys Wikipedia’s servers in Virginia, Texas, Amsterdam, San Francisco and Singapore, and all its mirror sites globally, and then possibly the entire Internet and our ability to rebuild it.
The people concerned with Wikipedia’s security take their roles reassuringly seriously, for they realise how much is at stake if they do not. When it began in 2001, its existence could not possibly have seemed so important. Its custodians are also rightly concerned with its future, and the future of how we obtain and comprehend information as we evolve.
When I Zoomed with Janeen Uzzell, Wikimedia’s chief operating officer, we predominantly discussed Wikimedia 2030, the strategic plan concerned with broadening access to the company’s resources. ‘Information and access to information has always been in the hands of the privileged,’ she said, while the plan talks of Wikimedia as a ‘social movement’ that will focus on dismantling the barriers preventing people from accessing and contributing to free knowledge. ‘Our current communities don’t represent the diversity of the human population,’ the document notes. That is to say, there are many other forms of knowledge beyond the printable page.
Katherine Maher told me that these days she seldom thinks of Wikipedia as an encyclopaedia at all. It is rather an ‘information ecosystem’ that will ideally link to many others (she mentions the Library of Congress and movie studios). She talks of ‘the integration of structured information with unstructured knowledge’, which will allow us to enter a newly concentrated world of learning open to all. Its 53 million articles will just be a jumping-off point.
Intriguingly, some of this ambition comes very close to the nineteenth-century liberal thinking of the poet Matthew Arnold and his supporters, who proposed an integrated ‘thoroughness of thought’ from ‘knowing ourselves and the world’, through a shared culture of science and literature. Arnold was largely thinking of the high-minded ivory tower, of course, while the Wikimedia Foundation aims to make this a universal global reality in the rather more complex digital sphere. It’s an impossibly noble project. And it inevitably made me glance back at Wikipedia’s home page from the end of its first year. ‘We already have 19,000 articles,’ it stated. ‘We want to make over 100,000, so let’s get to work.’