Numlock Sunday: Stephen Harrison on The Editors
Numlock Sunday: Stephen Harrison on The Editors
By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week, I spoke to Stephen Harrison, tech journalist and author of the new novel The Editors.
Harrison predominantly covers Wikipedia, one of the most interesting systems to emerge from the internet. His journalism dives into all the interesting, behind-the-scenes decisions and controversies on one of the most important sources of information on the internet, and that beat has informed his brand new, thrilling novel.
We spoke about the inspiration behind the book, some of the biggest stories out of Wikipedia over the past few years, and what it shows about how people interact with the internet.
Harrison can be found at his website, on X, or at Slate. His novel, The Editors, is out this week, you should check it out!
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Stephen, thank you so much for coming on.
Thanks for having me, Walt.
You are the author of a brand-new novel called The Editors. We're going to talk a little bit about that in a sec, but one thing that got me really excited for this book is that you cover a very interesting institution in Wikipedia, and there's obviously a lot of DNA of that institution in this book. I wanted to have a chance to talk to you about what got you on this topic, what got you interested in this really central thing for the internet, and then talk a little bit about the novel.
I like that word, “institution.” I do think that Wikipedia is an institution. It's quite old as far as websites go, and like a lot of institutions right now, it's being challenged in the current environment.
But what got me into Wikipedia from a journalistic standpoint was when I was on a business trip in New York. I'm originally from Texas, and I hadn't grown up with a lot of public transportation or the subway. I was at a subway station, and I was reading literally about the subway while on the subway in New York, and I looked up the individual subway stations. A lot of them have their own standalone Wikipedia articles, and I was like, these are so good. I wonder who has the time to write these.
I had recently learned that you could see the editors that contribute to an article, and in the pie chart, most of the edits were contributed by two usernames. I reached out to those two usernames, and it ended up that one was a high school senior and the other was a college student, a freshman in college. They were both from Queens, and I ended up interviewing them. That was my first article for the New York Times, about how these two relatively young people were doing so much work to maintain the Wikipedia articles on the subway, and from there I ended up writing regularly about Wikipedia for Slate.
There's always a Wikipedia issue. I think it's a microcosm; whatever's going on in society is also being reflected on Wikipedia. The pandemic was a big period, and then prior to that, there was the 2016 election. It covered each of those key moments. I now have a Source Notes entry from the time in my column at Slate, and then from there, I ended up thinking about what I wanted to do with it in terms of a long-form project. That's how I came up with the idea of writing a novel.
I love that. Any time you have something that has this much history, it's inherently interesting, but it’s also recorded. The very nature of this thing means so much of it is written down. From a journalistic perspective, what makes Wikipedia compelling to cover?
I like that you can see the history, and with Wikipedia, because there are so many edits, you can look at things very myopically. You can see, okay, what particular time did this editor introduce a word, or did any editor introduce a word? You can use a tool called WikiBlame and see when was, for example, COVID first described as a pandemic? You can find those really interesting small stories, but then you can look holistically at the way a topic evolves on Wikipedia and come up with a larger metanarrative.
Another interesting aspect of it is that a lot of these editors are faceless. They're not TikTok influencers or anything where you know what they look like or what their identities are, and I think that sense of mystery appeals to the investigative journalist in me.
I enjoyed how even stylistically, you weave that into the book; you’re looking at the breadcrumbs left by a lot of these folks. If you want to talk a little about what the book is about, we can go back and forth between the real world and the novel a bit. I found it really intriguing that you were able to use some of the structural language of Wikipedia in conveying elements of what's going on in the book.
With the prologue, I tried to just dive right in and show an article that was being edited in real time. Some wealthy person's father dies, and they take over the company, and that would be a day when there would be so many edits to that person's Wikipedia page. And you get a sense of the voices of the different editors and contributors as characters before you actually meet them in the offline world.
One reason I wanted to write it as a novel was that there are about 1,500 core contributors to Wikipedia. There would be so many people to include in a nonfiction book, but this allowed me to focus on certain personalities and certain key arguments that come up, and I think doing it in a narrative way allowed me to use a little bit more empathy, exist in the heads of the characters, see their different perspectives.
One of the things I've been talking about recently is that the New York Times just released a list of the top 100 books of the 21st century, from 2001 to now. Everyone identified something they didn't like about that list, but the thing that stood out to me the most is that none of those books really involve the internet in a meaningful way. It's actually pretty wild. There's one, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and I liked that book, but that's mostly about video gaming, I would say, or computer gaming. Hardly any of them really involve the internet, and I just think it's so strange that our literature isn't showing the ways that we interact with technology. One of the ways that people do interact with technology is through edits on a site like Wikipedia or social media posts, so I really wanted to include that epistolary element in the novel.
That's such a good point; there does seem to be a gap. I think there’s journalism being done — particularly by folks like you, and there are other folks who have blurbed your book that are stalwarts of the internet journalism space — but it does seem that it's been a bit slow to move toward the actual literature. There really hasn't been much between Snow Crash and today that’s integrated how we use the internet with literature. I really dug that the book took that rather seriously.
That's right, and it's certainly not like we haven't had time. Snow Crash, what is that, 20 years old now? Authors have had time.
I've got a few theories. I think one reason is that we interact with technology every day, and it's stressful for a lot of us, so maybe readers are looking for escapism in their literature. They'd rather read about fairy princesses or whatever than technology and how it's impacting our lives, but escapism is not the sole function of literature. One of the purposes of literature is to cast a light on our modern situation and help us think through the problems that we're dealing with in society. I'm hopeful that other authors will start including the internet in their novels. Obviously I'm biased, but that's the way I think it should be.
You've been covering Wikipedia for a few years now. You've hit on a couple — controversy is the wrong word, because I think some of these are a little bit too slow-moving and deliberate to actually be controversies, but one of my favorite things that you covered was when the Wikipedia editors who covered highways got caught in a trap of Wikipedia and original research.
It’s just such an interesting question about what gets recorded and what doesn't, and sparked so much conversation about Wikipedia just because it is this very democratic and systemic ecosystem. What are some stories in the past couple years that you've been able to cover that really convince you this is one of the most interesting projects going on right now?
The highway editor story was interesting for me. It was kind of a counterpart to the railfan story that got me interested at the very beginning with the subway.
I think there’s always this tension that Wikipedia is only supposed to reflect what's in reliable sources. Okay, well, what is a reliable source? I'd say often that's traditional journalistic media coverage, but what you and I and others are experiencing is that there's a lot less local media coverage than there was five, 10, 20 years ago, and Wikipedia doesn't want to open itself up to first-person sources like blogs and Substacks, for the most part, because those haven't been vetted by a third party. So that was an interesting story, the highway editors.
One thing that's also on my mind is the use of AI, which is affecting Wikipedia editors in a number of ways. They are, one, concerned with the fact that people go to Wikipedia less and end up on the page less, right? Because all this information that has been curated by editors over the course of years and years and years is now a freely available data source to applications like ChatGPT. The concern is that if ChatGPT doesn't attribute information to Wikipedia, then maybe people will have Wikipedia less on their mind and they'd be less likely to contribute. It's a sustainability issue. On the other hand, ChatGPT generally is prone to hallucinate. Another concern is that if Wikipedia editors add content that's generated by AI to Wikipedia, then that’ll lead to issues as to whether you can trust the information on Wikipedia. It will introduce errors.
But I also think there's a fair amount of Wikipedia editing that's very manual. You have to find a source. You have to do some old-school research to identify sources to put information in there, and there's a possibility, I think, for AI to help Wikipedia editors find sources so they can build pages.
Another one that I think would be one of my more interesting pieces was this article I wrote a few years ago based on some research. A legal scholar had found an indication that some judges in the Irish High Court were more likely to cite a case as precedent if that case had a Wikipedia entry. It’s an example of how the knowledge doesn't just exist in a vacuum, right? When the information's put out there, people use that to craft real-world decisions. Is it right that a case gets cited a lot more because it's on Wikipedia? I don't know, it may or may not be the best case, but it certainly shows that the information isn't just existing in a vacuum. It is actually influencing people's real-life decisions.
That's fascinating.
Before we bring it to a close, I want to hear a little bit about the book, what folks can expect from it, and what the pitch for it is. It does seem really, really compelling, and synthesizes a lot of these really cool ideas into a pretty gripping narrative.
The logline is “a thriller inspired by Wikipedia.” When I was first pitching it, I think people sort of thought I was crazy, but now that they've read it, they're like, oh, I actually get it.
It’s really from the perspective of four main characters. One is a journalist who's trying to get to the bottom of what's going on with this Wikipedia counterpart, Infopendium. The other is a young high school student who is one of Infopendium's most hard-core contributors, and for various reasons he's determined to fight what he perceives as misinformation on the site. Then there's an old-timer character, somebody who's been contributing to the project since the founding of the site in 2001, and he has a lot of views about what he sees as relaxed standards on the site and concerns about whether the site is in decline. The fourth is a paid consultant who lives in China and takes a number of really important clients, whether they're wealthy individuals or corporations, and ends up actually working for the Chinese Communist Party.
I would say that when I first started the book, in February 2020, I knew I wanted to write a novel that was inspired by Wikipedia, but I wasn't sure what the central conflict would be that would bring all these characters from around the world together. Maybe editing topics that are all dealing with the same subject on Infopendium? Then March of 2020 hit, and it was the pandemic, and I was like, this is the conflict. This is the central conflict that's going to bring them together.
Of course, with social distancing and everything, that meant a lot more writing time for me. I'm excited for people to finally read it. As Jeremy Burge, the founder of Emojipedia, said, it's going to feel instantly familiar to people who've been on the internet. But I also think it's going to be surprising to some people how the stakes of what's on this informational website are really impacting people's lives.
It's a really, really fun read. Folks should definitely check it out. I’ll be sure to link it up.
Stephen, where can folks find you? Where can they find your work?
My personal website is my name, StephenHarrison.com. I'm also on X, @HarrisonStephen, and Instagram, @StephenBHarrison.
All right. Thanks a bunch.
Thanks so much, Walt.
Edited by Susie Stark.
If you have anything you’d like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.
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Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news.
