Philip Roth: An Open Letter to Wikipedia
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
"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.
Roth, his biographer, or both, seem to not thoroughly understand Wikipedia. I'm not arguing that. However, even with an imperfect understanding, the nature of his solution to the problem is correct in the first iteration.
Roth complained about an interpretation of _The Human Stain_ that had been made in numerous extremely reputable secondary sources, despite the fact that the article included a recitation of Roth's own intent.
That's the core argument beneath the rant. Is that argument _wrong_? If not, it seems pretty compelling, regardless of how the rant itself is written. Facts don't become not facts simply because they're written hyperbolically.
In calmer waters, Oliver would express complete willingness to educate Roth, and his biographer, on Wikipedia policies. But my sense is that, like many domain experts, especially in subjects further from hard science, for Oliver bucking the established order is to be met with only the fiercest rebuke.
But the core issue here, just to make it very clear: Roth disagreed with a critical interpretation of _The Human Stain_ (albeit an interpretation that was grounded in fact --- "which acquaintance of Roth was the story inspired by"), and felt that his standing as the book's author gave him the authority to demand the removal of that interpretation from the encyclopedia.
I respectfully submit that you don't have to be a rules lawyer to accept the encyclopedia's refusal to do that.
My nephrology professor said there are two camps: the clumpers and splitters. While there may be some rules-based reason to make a distinction between the plights of Professor Messer-Kruse and Philip Roth, I think that to the first order they are both aggrieved experts outside the social circles of Wikipedia. To the second order, they both have a misunderstanding of Wikipedia's rules. To the third order, it appears the Wikipedia admins are not without fault in their willingness to move goalposts and parse ever further into a seemingly bottomless list of rules. To the fourth order, we are all enjoying a fair bit of hindsight: it probably wasn't so clear to anyone at the time Roth sat down to type this out.
I'm not disagreeing with you. My only point was that what Roth did passes the common sense test every bit as much as what the Wikipedians did, regardless of how much the Wikipedia admins may chafe under the pressure of someone bringing external pressure to their kingdom.
(Obviously, we're not the only ones frustrated about this, as this exact issue was why Larry Sanger split off from Wikipedia to create a competing projects which, as we all know, failed).
But I believe two things at the same time: Wikipedia has a problem with rules-lawyering insiders pushing away expert contributions, and that the Roth incident isn't one of those cases. And I think I sympathize with Wikipedians at being pilloried in the New Yorker for (it seems) doing everything right. We can safely assume that 99.9% of the readers of Roth's "letter to the editor" will take away from it the idea that Wikipedia is an ignorant self-serving bureaucracy --- the nerve! after all of a bunch of Internet nerds daring to tell Roth how to interpret his own novel! --- when, let's be honest here, Wikipedia is probably rather more important than all of Roth's book's taken together.
The parts where it was 1. unnecessarily vitriolic, 2. self-important, and where it 3. prioritized strict, literal interpretation over common sense. I'll take these in order, although the most important point is probably the last one.
1. Philip Roth is going on 80 years old. It's not reasonable to expect him, or anyone else really, to fully grasp the ins and outs of Wikipedia. And let's face it, there's plenty about Wikipedia to criticize, as HNers often do. You don't get to institute byzantine editorial policies and then condemn people who work around them. There's more than a hint of the Kafkaesque to Wikipedia's "official channels."
2. Wikipedia is cool, and the veracity problem is a hard one, but there's no excuse for punting on it. He's "not convinced that there’s a solution to this problem"[1]? I don't care. Try anyway. People get way too defensive about this stuff when they should be channeling their inner Josiah Bartlet: "we can do better, and we must do better, and we will do better, and we will start this moment today."
3. Finally -- and a better example of le mot juste I've not seen in a while -- a central plot element of The Human Stain is the power of allegation, even when false. The line Roth objected to was about the alleged inspiration for his character. Note, as Andreas Kolbe does in the first comment to Oliver's blog, that this comment was filed under Roth's bio page, where it really had no place, and not, as Oliver's blog examines, the page of The Human Stain itself, where a broader overview of critical reaction to the book makes sense. So if we're picking nits, Roth was actually right, and Oliver was shifting the goalposts, a common informal fallacy.
[1] That's from his follow-up post: http://quominus.org/archives/981
> False. There was absolutely no misstatement in the article. What the article claimed at the time he wrote this open letter was that “Kakutani and other critics were struck by the parallels to the life of Anatole Broyard, a writer and the New York Times literary critic in the 1950s and 1960s who was of Louisiana Creole mixed-race descent and passed for white”.
He uses this edit to claim Roth is either mentally incompetent ("aggrieved and confused ramblings") or lying ("a malicious act").
However, this claim by quominus/Oliver is a misdirection. Looking through the edit history, that cited edit clearly happened after Roth's biographer attempted to correct the article, a fact which Oliver certainly was aware. The article when Roth saw it read:
> Salon.com critic Charles Taylor argues that Roth had to have been at least partly inspired by the case of Anatole Broyard, a literary critic who, like the protagonist of ''The Human Stain'', was a man identified as Creole who spent his entire professional life more-or-less as white. Roth states there is no connection, as he did not know Broyard had any black ancestry until an article published months after he had started writing his novel.
This citation is very different. Here, saying "Roth had to have been at least partly inspired" clearly puts for the supposition that Roth did partly base the novel on Broyard, whereas the later edit only says that some people saw parallels.
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...
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.
I honestly cannot tell if this was meant to be a joke?
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.'
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.
Not saying it's the same case here, of course, just an example.
On the other hand, the bit that Philip Roth was upset about was not really about the meaning of the text. It was about someone's opinion of what he was thinking when he wrote the text. I can understand why he feels that he knows more about what he was thinking when he wrote the text than anyone else does.
I haven't seen anything that would indicate that he fails to recognize that everyone is entitled to their own interpretation of the meaning of the text.
If anything, reading the two articles brings them down a notch in my mind. I'd like to see Phillip Roth's response to Oliver.
Nice response though, even though it wasn't an official Wikipedia Response.
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]
"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
Attribute no more malice to any one else than you attribute to yourself.
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.