I Was a WikiWarrior for Barack Obama
Barry Wellman Feb 13, 2009
"Were it not for the Internet,
Barack Obama would not be president", said Arianna Huffington ("How
Obama's Internet Campaign Changed Politics"
As a dual US/Canadian citizen living
in
I decided to become a WikiWarrior. I
had become enthralled with Wikipedia a year earlier, and I had done over 1,000
edits to existing and new articles. It was an easy step to keep my eye on articles
about the Obamas. I felt that if I blocked non-sense from some articles, and
added a bit of sense, I might help bring some light to curious and
often-ignorant voters.
I shied away from the main Barack
Obama article (or the John McCain article): too many people were fighting over
large and small issues there. Instead, I focused on Obama's mother, Ann Dunham,
and step-daddy, Lolo Soetoro. I wanted to edit them honestly in a fair and
balanced way and to keep out pernicious propaganda. I put these articles on my
Wikipedia "watchlist" along with about 80 others articles, such as
"social network", "The Bronx" and Barry Wellman". I
also watched articles about other members of the Obama family, but they rarely
had major issues.
Editing Ann Dunham
There were two basic editing issues
with the Ann Dunham article. One issue was easy to deal with on a recurring
basis. Vandals kept inserting gross insults, such as:
She started sucking his
cock. She had never seen colored cock before and became addicted immediately.
(October 8, 2008)
These juvenile gross-outs were
always made by unregistered Wikipedia users, identifiable only by their IP
addresses. They were easy to fix by deletion (what Wikipedia calls
"reversion"): I used a Wikipedia tool called Twinkle to do this in
one key click. Often, I - or other editors - didn't have to bother: automated
program scripts. "Bots" (such as Huggle's
VoABot II in this case), were keyed to find words such as "cock" and
do a quick reversion within a few minutes.
The second issue with the Dunham
article was more subtle. Certain editors kept wanting to emphasize what they
thought was her sexually-liberated and atheistic persona. These were editors
registered at Wikipedia. Although a key Wikipedia tenet is to "Assume Good
Faith", I kept wondering why some worked so persistently at this. I came
to "Assume Ultra-Partisan Faith," as part of efforts to demonize
Obama ("socialist", "traitor") and his family.
Dealing with these edits was more
difficult, as those who were emphasizing Dunham atheism were able to find a
document saying so. (The criterion for including something in Wikipedia is a
verifiable, authoritative document rather than Colbertian truthiness.) However,
a number of editors, including myself, were able to show that Ann Dunham was broadly
supportive of the humanist aspect of religion. There is an entire difference in
tone between calling someone a "secular humanist" and an
"atheist".
The editing process continued after
the election. Just afterward (November 8, 2008: 1213 EST), the section gathered
a variety of Ms. Dunham's spiritual beliefs into one section that appears late
in the article. I then changed the section's heading from "Religious
beliefs" to "Spiritual beliefs". As of February 6, 2009 (when I
last revised this article), this revision remained.
A further debate was about how to
present Dunham’s date of marriage and Obama’s date of birth. Some editors
wanted to emphasize that the presidential candidate was born only six months
after his parents' marriage. The resolution was that the dates of marriage and
birth were left in, but the article leaves it to readers to do the math, if
interested. I had seen such a resolution before, when some editors tried to
point out the age gap between 2008 Republican presidential aspirant Fred
Thompson (born in 1942) and his second wife, (born in 1966).
Editing Lolo Soetoro
The article about Lolo Soetoro,
Barack Hussein Obama's stepfather, had a more subtle challenge. Recurrent
demonizations of Barack Obama kept asserting that he was really a Muslim (not
that there's anything wrong with that). Several editors wanted to emphasize
Lolo Soetoro's Muslim-ness, which might well affect how people thought about
Barack Obama. Yet, there were documentary sources that showed that while Lolo
Soetoro was nominally a Muslim, he wasn't religiously active. That didn't stop
several editors from making his Muslim religion a main focus of the article.
One recurring edit, still present in
the article, states that Lolo Soetoro is a member of the "Indonesian
Muslim" category (list) of Wikipedia articles. I kept trying to reason
with this editor, noting that few articles about Americans say they are members
of the "American Christian" category. I don't know if the editor was
trying for anti-Obama propaganda or was just bull-headed. I finally gave up
this skirmish, because the text of the article does not emphasize Soetoro's Muslim-ness,
and the category that does is buried at the end of
the article.
Editing Sarah Palin
I tried to edit the Sarah Palin for
a while, but a number of editors were protecting it from any changes. As they
had the numbers, their consensus ruled. For example, I was unable to add a
sentence into the Palin article pointing out that she had transferred among
five universities and colleges in the five years of her undergraduate
education.
Editorial Discourse
In none of these debates (sometimes
called "edit wars") did I - or anyone else -- ever say they were
acting on behalf of Obama or McCain. All phrased disagreements in terms of
Wikipedian norms: "the article would be tighter without that";
"you're providing undue emphasis"; "we need to make the article
more complete"; "please document your facts" and "removed
unencyclopedic writing about Sarah Palin" (i.e., too hagiographic or
demonizing). Without such civil discourse, cooperative editing couldn't take
place. Only once did a Wikipedia administrator threaten to block me for a day,
when I violated the "three revert rule" by repeatedly re-inserted my
sentence about Palin's collegiate hegira.
This is not to say that all
editorial debates about these articles were clear-cut oppositions. One
Wikicomrade ("Tvoz") and I disagreed about whether Lolo Soetoro
should have his own article in Wikipedia or be included in the portmanteau
article, "Family of Barack Obama". I argued that a lot of people
would go to Wikipedia for information on him, and that it was important that
the article be visible and accurate. Tvoz argued that Lolo was not notable in
his own right before the election -- "notability" is a key Wikipedia
criterion -- and therefore should only be in the Family article.
So far, Lolo retains his own article
as well as a cross-link from the Family article, but I am curious as to what
the future will bring now that the election is over. I predict a lot more
detail will arise, more calmly, about Ann and Lolo, but I will only notice
intermittently. I have taken Ann, Lolo and the Family off of my watchlist:
there were 84 edits of the Family article on November 7 2008, an overwhelming
volume to track, and now that
I am taking something of a
Wikibreak. After doing many edits on Ann Dunham, Lolo Soetoro, and the Family
of Barack Obama in the past few months (many of them reverting silliness or
discussing what to do with other editors (“Talk: Ann Dunham”), I need to bask
in Obama's victory and get back to life. However, the dark side is always with
us, so perhaps you could put these articles on your Wikipedia watchlist. I
think I have done enough that the Obama organization should finally send me a
fridge magnet.