

Philip Roth: An Open Letter to Wikipedia - ezequiel-garzon
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/09/an-open-letter-to-wikipedia.html

======
britta
This is a response by a person who works for the Wikimedia Foundation (a
personal response, not an official response):
<http://quominus.org/archives/979>

"There’s only one problem with this: Roth’s open letter is at best the
(justifiably) aggrieved and confused ramblings of a man ignorantly discussing
what he does not understand or remember..."

It's long and probably worth reading to get a more balanced view of the
situation.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I found the rebuttal fascinating. Neither Roth, nor Oliver, has even a smidgen
of compassion for the other party's point of view.

Philip Roth clearly doesn't "get" the fact that anyone can sign up and try to
edit Wikipedia claiming to be God if they want, and those edits must be
rejected because well they really could be anybody.

Oliver clearly doesn't "get" the fact that some people are so used to being
who they are, and so untainted by the deeper deceptions and pranks of the
Internet, that they clearly think that simply corresponding should be
sufficient. Certainly it was when written letters were taken why not now?

And when two proud people with orthogonal world views disagree, well it just
gets ugly and stays ugly sadly.

Wikipedia could do with a way for 'primary sources' to provide them with
information that they can both verify and use, so perhaps Philip could write
them a letter in his own hand and sign it and they could digitize that and
store it as the referenced source. It always helps to know that people who
aren't used to the Internet don't realize just how easy it is for dogs [1] to
troll you.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_y...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_youre_a_dog)

~~~
vacri
_Wikipedia could do with a way for 'primary sources' to provide them with
information that they can both verify and use_

They have a way to verify a primary source - use a secondary source.

 _perhaps Philip could write them a letter in his own hand and sign it and
they could digitize that and store it as the referenced source_

Wikipedia intentionally does not pursue original research, which this
certainly is.

~~~
justin66
> They have a way to verify a primary source - use a secondary source.

I honestly cannot tell if this was meant to be a joke?

~~~
ChuckMcM
Its confusing isn't it? In Wikipedia speak you need someone other than the
'primary source' reporting on the information 'from' the primary source. Kind
of like link authority in page rank. So if someone says "I'm the VP at JC
penney and our web site is www.eatmybits.com" that is a 'primary' source but
its not verified by anyone else, but if the New York times says "Oh look, JC
penny just changed their primary URL to www.eatmybits.com" then that secondary
source, quoting a primary source, gets approved. Its the whole 'someone we
trust has vouched for something you are saying, so we kinda sort of believe it
to be true.'

The whole thing is made worse by Wikipedia editors who tend to speak in a
short hand which as time goes on gets more and more opaque.

All of it being a result of volunteer efforts to curate a source of 'facts.'

~~~
justin66
Thank you. I honestly don't know quite what to make of the whole situation. I
understand the issues of making the project function well enough, I think, but
the implementation saddens me.

I'd like to think that even if I were 100% sympathetic with wikipedia policy,
I'd still be able to see how petty, stupid and embarrassing quominus's rant
was. It strikes me as pure, but of course unintentional, self-parody on so
many levels. And of course I'm saddened because I can see that there's a
personality type that would think quominus's spite and the fixation on fiddly
minutia instead of the big picture is brilliant and great... and they're
probably the sort of people who edit Wikipedia articles.

------
Mithrandir
From Wikipedia:

On September 7, 2012, Roth wrote an open letter to Wikipedia in the The New
Yorker in which he dismissed critics' earlier suggestions that his novel was
inspired by Anatole Broyard.[13] He said that he had used an incident in the
life of his friend, Melvin Tumin, professor of sociology at Princeton, and
created everything else about his character, Coleman Silk. Roth used details
from Tumin's experience in the events that led to Silk's resigning from the
college.[13] Roth acknowledged that he had met Broyard, but wrote that he
barely knew him.[13] He said, "I’ve never known, spoken to, or, to my
knowledge, been in the company of a single member of Broyard’s family. I did
not even know whether he had children."[13]

Bliss Broyard, the daughter of Anatole Broyard, posted a response on Facebook:

"I think it’s completely reasonable that Roth should be allowed to have the
last word on who inspires his characters and even obfuscate about the sources
if he wants to… BUT I don’t think it’s reasonable that Roth gets to dictate
what conclusions other people draw about his characters, which is effectively
what he was trying to do with his objection to Wikipedia’s description of the
book as 'allegedly' having been inspired by my dad."[14]

She said her father had introduced her to Roth at a literary party when she
was 22:

" 'Bliss,' my father said, rather pompously, 'this is one of our most
important American novelists.' He [Roth] turned to regard me. 'So lithe and
pale,' he pronounced. 'Like a ghost.' It was a brief encounter—one I’m not
surprised that he might have forgotten—but I am sure you all can understand
why I haven’t."[14]

~~~
petegrif
Surely he isn't trying to dictate what conclusions other people draw? He is
simply trying to state facts as he sees them and help those who have drawn
inaccurate conclusions based on speculation or lack of evidence.

~~~
kwekly
If you read to the end of the article, you come across an an interesting
comment that might be of relevance here:

"If you think Phillip Roth, one of the greatest living writers, wrote this
2,648 word piece to get a remark on Wikipedia changed, I think you've missed
his point.

\- GREGPOMEROY

~~~
Evbn
Right. He wrote it because it was a paying gig, it fed I his ego, and he likes
writing.

~~~
niels_olson
Maybe he actually cares about the future of culture, recognizes that Wikipedia
is extremely relevant, and wants to make a difference. Maybe he thinks more
people outside current 20-somethings should care about this issue, and is
thereby inviting them to join in the conversation.

Attribute no more malice to any one else than you attribute to yourself.

------
saurik
I really don't understand how Wikipedia feels like a "secondary source" is
meaningful: most secondary sources (newspapers being a great example) just
print whatever they are told by random non-expert or highly biased primary
sources; I have seen this first-hand while talking to reporters doing
interviews with me on various topics. In practice, the fact checking
departments, even for headline stories in the physical version of the paper
for the largest publications in the country, end up just calling the primary
source to get a clarification: so, if an article about Roth were to have ended
up in the New York Times, Roth himself actually would have been consulted on
whether or not it was true, and yet somehow going through that intermediary
makes the situation more credible to Wikipedia... insanity.

Further, many secondary sources are actually themselves based on Wikipedia as
their primary source: if you then are willing to cite secondary sources as
verifications of information that is then posted to Wikipedia, it is highly
trivial to end up with self-reinforcing information loops; in addition to
there being multiple highly-cited examples of this, I have seen it happen
first-hand with a friend constructing such a situation (which eventually got
noticed and deleted, but only due to a highly suspicious editor that attempted
to track down whether the sources were actually using Wikipedia as their
reference; had it been slightly more vague I bet we would forever be stuck
with that particular misinformation).

I will even argue that the idea of using secondary sources at all is short
sighted: the very secondary sources that Wikipedia is attempting to cite are
slowly dying out due to Internet replaces that happen to include Wikipedia
itself. In another decade, the source material for remotely credible secondary
sources is likely to have dwindled to almost nothing: we will be left with
things more akin to wikis and blogs and the kind of broken thought streams
that are characteristic of today's Twitter and Facebook: we are (quite sadly,
I will argue) quite likely to no longer be allocating such funds to
centralized larger sources like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal
to keep them operational.

Finally, I will point out that it ignores the heritage of an encyclopedia: as
far as I understand, the way the great encyclopedias were written actually did
involve conscripting the world's great minds to write what were in essence
summary articles of various parts of their fields so that people in other
disciplines, or even the lay person, could rapidly get a general understanding
of the subject matter. (One specific place I got this impression was from
reading a book about Thomas Young, who wrote a number of articles for the
Encyclopedia Britannica). Yet, now, the encyclopedia that has become the de
facto standard--I will argue entirely due to technology and community, and not
due to the dictates that it claims are so holy--requires information to have
first been published in sources like newspapers, rather than sources like
academic journals... it is honestly highly depressing.

------
ta12121
Didn't this already make the aggregator rounds a few months ago when it first
came out?

~~~
niels_olson
If it did, it's still okay to post it now. Have you heard about Marcus
Aurelius's Mediations? They're great. You should read them. (Hint: not the
first time that's been said in a public forum, or "news aggregator", if that's
what you want to call it.)

~~~
rohamg
Marcus Aurelius and Phillip Roth's open letter in the same breath? You have
cajones I'll give you that!

