{"id":2773,"date":"2012-09-15T17:51:28","date_gmt":"2012-09-15T21:51:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/sj\/?p=2773"},"modified":"2012-09-15T22:56:33","modified_gmt":"2012-09-16T02:56:33","slug":"what-wroth-roth-wrought-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/2012\/09\/15\/what-wroth-roth-wrought-2\/","title":{"rendered":"“What Wroth Roth Wrought” by Virginia Hefferman and Oliver Keyes"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

We may have a national drought, but a bumper crop of brilliant essays of, by, and for Wikipedia are turning up this weekend.<\/p>\n

Oliver Keyes \/ Ironholds<\/a> turned out this\u00a0gem of an essay<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0deconstructing, line by line, how many claims and statements in the original New Yorker piece fell somewhere between confused and false. \u00a0In particular, he highlights that Roth has\u00a0already been cited<\/a>\u00a0in the article\u00a0at the time<\/a>\u00a0as disputing the claims by many critics that Broyard’s life was an influence on his character.<\/p>\n

And he points out how credulous our traditional media are, when dealing with respected authors: how few outlets made an effort to check statements Roth made before repeating them, and often assumed they were true in coming up with social and factual analyses. <\/p>\n

But these are the institutions that we – Wikipedians an everyone else – look up to for fact-checking and peer review in the first place. \u00a0\u00a0How to make sense of this communication gap?<\/p>\n

Enter Virginia Hefferman<\/strong>, stage right. \u00a0She published\u00a0an insightful piece, with stylish patter to match the subject matter,\u00a0on how the Rothroversy illustrates a\u00a0digital culture war<\/a>.\u00a0An excerpt:<\/p>\n

\n
At least two Americas, then. Each with its own civilizations, its own holy artifacts, its own shamans. For contrast: Wikipedia is an open-source encyclopedia, born in 2001; it has some 365 million readers in 265 languages. The New Yorker is an American general-interest weekly, born in 1925. It has a circulation of almost 1.05 million, in a single language. Wikipedia America and New Yorker America are so dug into their hierarchies of values that, really, they can only cultivate blindness about the other lest they implode in madness.<\/em>
\n\u00a0<\/em>
\nThe East Coast establishment, for its part, is still so sure of itself that when Roth, one of its most esteemed denizens, finds himself narcissistically bugged in the usual way with something on Wikipedia, he doesn\u2019t do what the rest of us do when Wikipedia narcissistically bugs us: learn the supremely learnable procedures for submitting changes to that populist and infinitely flexible document.<\/em>
\n\u00a0<\/em>
\nRoth doesn\u2019t read enough on the site to learn that at Wikipedia,\u00a0nothing\u00a0is left \u201con author\u201d (as we used to say of the very rare uncheckable fact when I did my own time at\u00a0The New Yorker). Everything must be sourced…\u00a0<\/em>
\n <\/em>
\n\u201cThe Human Stain,\u201d as a novel, might rise or fall on its status\u00a0as a fictionalization of the life of this or that obscure\u00a0intellectual. But Wikipedia, as the near-miraculous open-source\u00a0document that defines knowledge on the Web, lives or dies on the\u00a0strength of its traditions of anonymity, proceduralism, humility and\u00a0collaboration. Once it knuckles under to power\u2014literary, political,\u00a0any kind\u2014it cracks. Wikipedia as it stands is chaotic and\u00a0error-ridden, although anything but soulless: It breathes with the\u00a0intelligence of the hundreds of millions of people, around the world,\u00a0who use it and contribute to it and take pride in it and maintain it.<\/em><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Hefferman was recruited away from the New York Times to the increasingly impressive Yahoo! News earlier this year.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We may have a national drought, but a bumper crop of brilliant essays of, by, and for Wikipedia are turning up this weekend. Oliver Keyes \/ Ironholds turned out this\u00a0gem of an essay\u00a0deconstructing, line by line, how many claims and statements in the original New Yorker piece fell somewhere between confused and false. \u00a0In particular, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1202,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[211,213,1,709],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-international","category-metrics","category-uncategorized","category-wikipedia"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iVvB-IJ","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2773"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2773\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2804,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2773\/revisions\/2804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}