Wikipedia, the Last Bastion of Shared Reality
The culture wars are coming for the best utopian project of the early internet. Can it survive the informational anarchy that’s disrupted the rest of media?
The ever-widening maelstrom surrounding tweets by Sarah Jeong, the latest hire by the New York Times editorial board, may consume all the atoms in the known universe, and as Wikipedia is of this world, it, too, must be a place to immortalize (or attempt to immortalize) Jeong as racist.
Over the years, Jeong has angrily and colorfully tweeted hundreds of times about her frustrations with white people (“Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins”; “oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy i get out of being cruel to old white men”). After her hiring, these tweets were picked up by right-wing media as proof of her “racism.” The battle over including these tweets in her Wikipedia bio has been the subject of a brutal edit war, which is like a grim national-politics-level recapitulation of the old, funny Wikipedia wars about cow-tipping, hummus, and Nikola Tesla.
Wikipedia’s internal rules guide debates about what content belongs in articles, and how events can be…
