Recently I decided to take the plunge I’d been contemplating for over a year.
Ideonomy didn’t have its own Wikipedia page. Should I go ahead and create one?
The post below describes my experience in doing this.
It’s longer than my typical post, but since I’m an entertaining writer who happens to specialize in bureaucratic rants, you may very well find yourself reading to the end.
A significant culture surrounding the creation and curation of information has grown up around Wikipedia since its launch in early 2001. I knew that. But I didn’t know exactly how deep and intense it could get until I navigated to the blank page for ideonomy on Wikipedia, created my own user account, and began to write.
You see, I’m what they call an impulsive learner.
Some people want to sit down, read the rules, get all the information structured in their head, and then go ahead with whatever they’re planning.
That’s not really my style.
In order to learn anything, I need to have my hands busy. I need to try and fail. I need to do something first and have an experience.
And so, as a result of my learning style—or perhaps my naïveté—I discovered first-hand just how comprehensive Wikipedia’s governance regime has become.
I learned that in addition to policies (must be followed) and guidelines (should be followed, but some flexibility), there are also a whole other category of governance works called “essays.”
Yes, you heard me right… essays, a sort of informal midrash that’s sprung up alongside the more formal Wikipedia scripture in order to help aid with its interpretation, explain the culture, and provide framing for disputes.
People have been so interested and involved with Wikipedia, you see, that they’ve written essays about their experience with Wikipedia.
These essays have not been formalized as policies but, you know, you can still read them if you have the time.
Which, of course, I didn’t—until my article on ideonomy got flagged for deletion and this scary red banner appeared at the top of the page.
Time to Panic?
Now don’t get me wrong, there’s always been a lot at stake for Wikipedia.
Ever since H.G. Wells fascinated intellectuals by proposing his idea of a global repository of knowledge called a ”World Brain” in 1938, the concept of a globally accessible, universal encyclopedia has thrilled librarians, information scientists, and intellectuals alike.
And, as he usually was, it turns out H.G. Wells was right.
Without a doubt, Wikipedia is the most obvious and useful representation of the World Brain concept we have available to us at the present time.
Wikipedia is a key player in the global information space.
According to similarweb, Wikipedia is currently the 9th most popular website in the world, and has consistently been ranked in the top 10 of the most popular websites.
I remember having an encyclopedia as a kid. That was quickly replaced by digitized encyclopedias on CD-ROMs. And in no time at all, the CD-ROMs were replaced with a website—Wikipedia.
In a quarter of a century, Wikipedia has put an entire sub-industry out of business.
And the stakes are even higher now that Large Language Models (LLMs) are gobbling up any new information they can find, with Wikipedia essentially one of a few must-stop destinations on the global, round-the-clock information-ingestion tour.
No sooner did I create a Wikipedia page for ideonomy than it immediately became a top-ranked hit in a Google search.
That gobsmacked me.
Even after my ideonomy page got flagged for deletion, a Google search kept delivering my Wikipedia article as the #2 hit just below the MIT ideonomy website.
People spend years trying to game the system, create backlinks, establish credibility, and push their pages to the top of a Google search query.
My own website for the Gunkel Global Renaissance Project doesn’t even come up yet. (This is actually my fault for not prioritizing it.)
Talk about a powerful way to enter the global information space… find a topic without a Wikipedia page and write an article about it and boom, just like that, you’re coming in at the top of a Google search.
Back to the Deletion Threat…
OK, OK, I told myself. Calm down.
Given the stakes, it’s not surprising that Wikipedia editors are aggressive about moderating new pages.
When I started to dive into things and converse with the editor who had flagged the page—a user named SuperTurboA+—I realized that I was actually coming out pretty well.
The central question that Wikipedia editors want to know is this: whether the topic is notable, whether it’s important enough to have an entry. My job as the page’s author was to prove that it was.
Some pages can be deleted immediately if their content is obviously SPAM, vandalism, copyright violations, or nonsense. That didn’t happen.
Other pages get put into a sort of temporary purgatory called PROD, for “proposed deletion.” That’s where an editor is pretty sure a webpage doesn’t meet Wikipedia’s notability criteria and wants to see if they’re missing something. It’s the equivalent of being dangled over the edge of a rooftop by an editor and waiting to see if anyone comes to your rescue. That didn’t happen either.
Instead, my article was flagged for Articles for Deletion (AfD) discussion, a community consensus-building process where editors huddle and discuss the fate of a particular article. It’s meant to be an intensive discussion that involves fact-checking and voting.
As it turns out, one of the mistakes I made with the first draft of my ideonomy article is that I referenced Jo Zarboulas’ 1988 article on Gunkel, which can be found appended to the MIT website underneath David Stipp’s Wall Street Journal article. SuperTurboA+ didn’t like that because the article was never formally published. They also didn’t like that one of my cited sources was a 1985 New England Monthly article about Gunkel written by a science writer named Fred Hapgood. This article is not available electronically. I only encountered it via the MIT archives. I held the magazine with the article in my hands. It was a real magazine and a real article. And yet when SuperTurboA+ tried to verify the article, he searched Google Scholar and couldn’t find any reference to it. So do you know what he did? He assumed it was an AI hallucination.
I removed references to the Zarboulas article.
And I tried to assure the editor that the New England Monthly article was real, even offering to email it to them. (I included photographed images of the article below.)
All the other sources I’d provided, I pointed out, were totally legitimate. And most of them were electronically accessible.
SuperTurboA+ conceded the point about the hallucination and removed the tag.
But my ideonomy article still had a big, credibility-destroying banner on the top of the page suggesting it was scheduled for deletion:
And I was still in Articles for Deletion purgatory.
One Other Problem
I guess I should have foreseen it.
I guess I should have been thinking ahead.
But I simply couldn’t resist.
In jumping on Wikipedia to make an article for ideonomy, I had done the responsible thing and created an editorial profile for myself. My user name?
GUNKELFAN
In the superficial world of the Internet where every byte of data is subject to deconstruction in the absence of any other knowledge, this little nugget ended up coming back to bite me. It was the first thing my editorial antagonist, SuperTurboA+, noted about the article. He flagged it as a COI, for conflict of interest.
Now on the surface, logically, this could make sense.
But when you think about it, shouldn’t my user name provide assurance that my information was actually good? That I wasn’t trying to hide behind a neutral name but stating, outright, what my interests were? Not that I was self-promoting, but that I was exactly the expert who should have been writing an article on ideonomy?
I didn’t write an article about Andrew McIntosh and then call myself McIntoshfan.
I didn’t cite my own research.
I didn’t even cite Gunkel’s work, per Wikipedia policy, but the sources of those people who wrote about him over the decades.
I’d provided over 20 references to establish the legitimacy and notability of ideonomy—sources ranging from historical write-ups like the Wall Street Journal article to contemporaneous references to ideonomy that are regularly popping up in academic literature.
Indeed, by objecting to my authorship of the page purely on the basis of my username, SuperTurboA+ seems to have overlooked the fact that someone named “HistoryBuff” probably should have every right, and even be encouraged, to write or edit Wikipedia articles on history. And someone named “RedSoxFan” probably should be curating websites related to the Red Sox. Why would these hypothetical cases not signal a conflict of interest, but my user name would?
I felt that I’d provided a slam-dunk case for ideonomy in order to guard against deletion.
But as the days dragged on and my Wikipedia article on ideonomy continued to sport a red banner noting that it had been scheduled for deletion, I began not only to doubt my own ability to legitimize ideonomy on Wikipedia—I began to seriously question the process that is supposedly so fundamental to establishing truth in the age of the Internet.
The Ugly Truth
What goes through the mind of a Wikipedia editor as they cruise through the queue of new pages, trying to keep things clean and accountable?
I realize that I’m turning this experience into an essay of my own. There is something very deep here. The process for authenticating information, for establishing legitimacy, the back-and-forth of ideas… all of this Gunkel would have had a lot to say about, and all of it connects to the importance of “the idea sciences” as an undeveloped discipline.
One struggle, I suspect, is that a certain lack of historical imagination, or perhaps a sort of assumption about the mission, takes over, in that your typical editor assumes all relevant articles have already been written about historical topics, and that the most important work is to vet new pages to keep pace with current changes and events.
I imagine some editors freezing up when confronted with numerous historical sources establishing ideonomy as a valid science and Gunkel as an innovative researcher.
If this is all true, why hasn’t someone already written an article about this?
As the days passed, and my ideonomy article on Wikipedia continued to sit there waiting for the promised discussion to emerge under AfD policies, the initial half-baked effort SuperTurboA+ put in began to compound.
On the talk page for the proposed deletion, a Wikipedia editor named Graeme Bartlett plopped “ideonomy” into Google Scholar and came up with 120 sources. Must be a keeper, he concluded, apparently without looking at any of them.
Another user, HerBauhaus, objected. She searched for ideonomy in JSTOR, did not see any articles that said “ideonomy” in the title, then went to Google Scholar and looked at 20 “random sources” that also apparently did not have “ideonomy” in the title, because she prodded the first user for more information about how he concluded ideonomy was legitimate.
Meanwhile, nobody—not SuperTurboA+, Graeme Bartlett, or HerBauhaus—WAS LOOKING AT THE SOURCES I HAD ALREADY PROVIDED ON THE IDEONOMY WIKIPEDIA PAGE.
I mean, it would have been that simple.
They were coming along and trying to do some kind of independent search, but they were doing it superficially, and for some reason they were not even looking at the sources I’d already provided.
Dénouement
As I mentioned in last week’s post, Gunkel himself ended up getting banned from Wikipedia for being too difficult. I knew I was pushing against that line myself now, but I also knew that I had truth on my side whereas Gunkel may have had… something else entirely.
Not only did I chastise HerBauhaus for their lazy attempt to validate the Wikipedia article, I also harassed SuperTurboA+ again, pointing out that he already had all the information he should need to acknowledge the article met Wikipedia’s notability criteria and he was simply refusing to do so. I refrained from referring him to an essay about Wikipedia editors power-tripping, although that’s certainly something I could have done.
Soon after my salvo, my editorial antagonist relented.
With a brusque send-off, like the gruff drill sergeant of cinematic lore who is ultimately forced to admit he underestimated the skill of a new recruit, SuperTurboA+ chastised me for “not voting properly” on the AfD discussion (what’s the point of voting on my own article?) and referred me to yet more Wikipedia essays to help me do better in the future.
At the same time, he withdrew the AfD nomination.
The discussion was closed soon after by another editor, and the shocking red banner that said the ideonomy article was slated for deletion was removed.
To bring this long story to a close, we can consider Patrick Gunkel and his long-ago editorial banning from Wikipedia to be finally avenged.
And let’s take a moment to celebrate the new potential of a future where ideonomy has been validated by Wikipedia, at the same time we must remember that the information wars continue all around us. What’s done is fragile and can easily be undone.
So if anyone out there wants to help, just let me know.
And for the record, here’s a copy of the Fred Hapgood article that SuperTurboA+ claimed was an AI hallucination:
Note: I do not have permission to disseminate this material. It is my understanding the New England Monthly went out of business soon after this article was published. If there are concerns with the dissemination and you are the valid owner of the material, please contact me directly at [email protected].