June 2015
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In an upstairs room at Glasgow’s Riverside Museum, a group of people are sitting around computers, with books, papers and prints spread around them, talking about – among many other things – how precisely to describe the fairground ride known as the Waltzers. They need to get it absolutely clear, because they’re editing Wikipedia: potentially anyone across the world could soon be looking up this entry if they want to know how many cars the ride typically has (10), or whether it’s still legal in Britain to hang over the gangway waiting for your turn (it isn’t).
Attempting to be helpful, I proffer the observation that carriages containing only girls tend to get more spins from the usually young male operators than those with boys, or mixed, but my suggestion is firmly kyboshed: it’s anecdotal and can’t be backed up with an acceptable reference from an authoritative source. We may be talking all the fun of the fair, but this is serious business.
The event is a Wiki editathon, a meeting which gets together experienced and new Wikipedia editors in order to create, fix and improve particular topics in the massive online encyclopaedia which for many is now the first – and often, last – place to check for information on almost everything. This editathon’s focus is on Scottish fairground culture: those fiddling with the website’s notoriously fiddly code are a mixture of social history experts, museum curators and the like, and born-and-bred showpeople themselves, who bring decades of expert knowledge.
Mitch Miller is both, being a local academic and writer who grew up on the shows; alongside him is Natalie Cowie-Kayes, owner of show events company Swings And Roundabouts. They know their stuff; the problem is finding sources which back up their personal knowledge, especially as show culture traditionally tended to be an oral one, with stories and memories being passed down families. So it’s a slightly frustrating process: some things they’re sure are true, but can’t use. But both of them think it’s worth it to record these details which could be otherwise lost forever, as the culture shrinks in the more technological age which Wikipedia itself represents.
‘We know that things are changing for our community and we are struggling to keep up with that,’ says Natalie. ‘If we don’t come forward and explain who we are, people will come up with their own narrative about us and there can be a lot of misconceptions.’
John Wheatley Harris, another of the veteran showpeople taking part, agrees: ‘When people ask you, “are you a traveller?” – no – “are you a gypsy?” – no – well, I want to be able to say, “just go on Wikipedia, that will tell you and you’ll understand better”. The Big Fat Gypsy Wedding series did so much damage and people think that’s what we’re like, but that’s not my culture, it’s a different culture. People will never know how it was unless we tell them. I want my kids and my grandchildren to be able to go on and find out’.
But the misrepresentations aren’t exactly new: he’s come across an old newspaper article from the turn of the last century which whips up a strangely familiar frenzy about ‘5,000 immigrant gypsies’ encamped at Vinegarhill, the former Gallowgate site where showpeople would stay while working at the annual fair at Glasgow Green. Wheatley Harris remembers the site and knows that it couldn’t possibly have held that number; he thinks it was more likely a hundred or so European showpeople who’d come over to run their rides that summer.
By the end of the day’s editathon, the group have cleaned up some of the vaguer or misleading entries and added a few more. But they’ll need to keep an eye on them, for the problem – and the huge benefit – of Wikipedia is that someone else could come along and change it all again.
Since the site began in 2001, its growth has been astonishing: 470 million people visit it every month. There are more than 35 million entries, some continually revised; many massively detailed and helpful, others…less so. Students are firmly instructed not to rely on Wikipedia for all their knowledge. Any teacher or lecturer will tell you how much notice is taken of that, with some chancers still turning in essays whose sources all begin with en/Wikipedia.org/wiki/. Those who grew up with the site often have a trusting faith in its veracity; those who remember the days that research meant libraries, dusty shelves of the Encyclopaedia Britannica or microfiche should know better but usually don’t. We all do it, flicking to Wiki to see if Whatshisname got an Oscar for that film or what currency they use in Bolivia. A procrastinator’s dream, the ‘Random Article’ button is a particular delight. And the site’s free-to-use principle makes it a democratic education; if you have the internet, you can learn about almost anything.
But because it’s an open platform, compiled live almost entirely by volunteers, there are massive imbalances within the system. Only around a tenth of Wikimedians (that is, individual contributors) are female. They’ve traditionally tended to be techy, geeky types, with particular ranges of knowledge, and the entries available often reflect that; conceivably everything can be on Wikipedia, but someone has to put it there. And what people know or can be bothered writing about varies. The entry on ‘Toilet paper orientation’, for instance, is almost 5,000 words long, including quotations from various celebrities who have expressed a preference for paper hanging over or under the roll (‘Beverly Hills 90210’ actress Tori Spelling says ‘Over is more chic’). There is an exhaustive list of the cars driven in every episode of the 22 series of ‘Top Gear’. But there is no list yet for ‘British female scientists’.
There are issues too with deliberate misrepresentation – sometimes for fun (actor Gary Oldman’s biography once stated that he was born a giraffe), sometimes to push a particular agenda. Politician Grant Shapps was alleged to have used a ‘sockpuppet’ account, hiding his identity, to repeatedly edit out embarrassing material from his entry. As the revised version carefully cites, he denied it. A self-policing mechanism means that the most egregious fibs or mistakes in popular entries are usually picked up and corrected by other Wikimedians, but many can lurk for months on less frequented pages. Occasionally administrators have to lock a page to stop ‘edit wars,’ where users repeatedly change each other’s edits to insist upon their interpretation.
But rather than complain about it, those who care particularly about facts are urged to get involved and fix them – hence Wikipedia’s encouragement of editathons and the recent development of Wikimedians-in-Residence, editors who take up placements with institutions such as museums, libraries or archives and try to increase their links with the site. There have been two Wikimedians-in-Residence in Scotland; the first was with the National Library and began in 2013. Sara Thomas, who organised the fairground culture event, is currently with Museums Galleries Scotland for a year and reports of her work so far are, naturally, up on Wikipedia.
It’s a bit of a case of ‘if you can’t beat the online encyclopaedia, join it’ and an interesting philosophical shift for some curators and librarians: instead of setting their collections up as the definitive source of knowledge, they’re encouraged to spread that out online, to close the gap between Wiki and the real world. But, as the emphasis on citing your sources shows, they’re trying to maintain the respect for facts which more traditional institutions or published books have held dear. It’s a balancing act but necessary if they’re to meet the challenges of the 21st century. That’s as much true for researchers as for Waltzer operators.
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