As a Mob Attacked the Capitol, Wikipedia Struggled to Find the Right Words
‘Storming’? ‘Insurrection’? ‘Riot’? ‘Attempted coup’? On Wikipedia, where neutrality is prized above all, volunteers are still struggling to name what happened on January 6.
By Alex Pasternack
On the afternoon of January 6, as a giant crowd began to swarm the U.S. Capitol, Jason Moore, a 36-year-old digital strategist, was at home in Portland, Oregon, switching between CNN and MSNBC. “I try not to get caught up in the sensationalism of cable news,” he says, but admits he had to watch. Soon, concern became shock. “I could not believe what I was witnessing, and also knew history was being made.”
So he got to work. Moore is a veteran editor on Wikipedia, spending hours a day creating, shepherding, and policing articles. He started in 2007, ranging across topics of personal interest like music or architecture, but since early last year he’s been focused on the pandemic and political protests. Just after 1:30 p.m. EST, as rioters and police clashed at the bottom of the Capitol steps, he wrote, “On January 6, 2021, thousands of Donald Trump supporters gathered in Washington, D.C., to reject results of the November 2020 presidential election.” He appended links…
