Revising “Revision and Collapse”

Origins

The idea for “Revision and Collapse” came from an experiment inspired by a history writing technologies course I was taking at the University of Minnesota. The class itself focused on imagined communities, the idea that communities exist only when individual people perceive themselves as belonging to them. For example, a person might identify themselves as American, or Christian, or as a fan of a sports team, although there are no specific qualifications or rules for belonging to any of these groups (in fact we argue all the time about who is American and who isn’t, whether your neighbor is a real fan or if he only cheers when a team is successful, etc.). Another, less-defined, community is that of Wikipedia: a group of dedicated users and their quest for objectivity, the staggering levels of work and research going into articles that can be (and usually are) undermined by less serious and anonymous users.

Wikipedia has always been bizarre in a sense: we can’t ever take its content seriously because of the very democratic model it argues makes it credible. Because of its (justified or not) shortcomings as a credible source, dedicated members and moderators do everything they can to give the project legitimacy. In order for an article to be featured—basically meaning that it’s of an acceptable level of quality and legitimacy—the writing must be properly cited and objectively written, and cannot include any kind of original research. Basically they are looking for qualifiers that make their information seem credible, even when it isn’t because it’s so easily undermined by wiki-vandals (people who intentionally put false information into articles on the site).

Wikipedia’s qualifiers have shaped their own unique style, and I’m interested in the ways in which these qualifiers have shaped the website’s articles, the ways in which these qualifiers force the writer to make certain stylistic moves that they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) conceive of without the sense of restraint. We see this idea of formal restraint all the time in poetry: even a basic A-B-A-B rhyme scheme forces the poet to use very specific language, and she must get creative if she wants the poem not to sound grammatically awkward or rhythmically bunk. There isn’t as much of a tradition with formal constraint in prose—though admittedly, this is becoming more common all the time with essays like Dinty Moore’s Google Maps essay “Mr. Plimpton’s Revenge,” or Jenny Boully’s “The Body,” made entirely of footnotes to a text we cannot see.

In any case, I wanted to write an essay that used the language and style of Wikipedia to tell a story of personal events.

My research also got me thinking about the writer’s persona, particularly how that functions in an online setting like Wikipedia. Just like memoir, we read it differently depending on what we know about the author. We question the anonymous editor, but users like the wonderfully named “Essjay,” whose profile tells us he is a tenured professor of religion, will carry more weight because of their credentials. It doesn’t matter when the New Yorker discovers that he is in fact a 24-year-old, who may or may not have a college degree, as long as we believe in the persona. Before he was outed, Essjay could pretty much write whatever he wanted with impunity because he was such a pro at the Wikipedia model—using objective language, catching vandals, and revising more articles than just about anyone in the world. Citation should be key here; it should matter what sources a user includes—though this creates another paradox: Is it true simply because a source tells us it is so? When I started on this project, I would take random books and cite them as proof for my facts, though I never actually read anything. The books I chose couldn’t be accessed electronically, which meant that someone would have to actually read a book in order to prove me wrong. It’s too much work for most editors...