There's something poignant about how simple it is, the act of killing someone on Wikipedia. It's no great song and dance. Really, it just comes down to adding a second year after their birth date, and then going through the rest of the piece, changing everything to the past tense. It should be poetic, but in practice it feels more like being a teller closing a bank account.
The other week, I was too busy closing out Tim Russert's Meet the Press page on Wikipedia to notice what was unfolding around me. When the star NBC reporter died of a heart attack, his employer held off on reporting the news for almost two hours so that his family could be informed. The network also asked its competitors to do the same, and most complied.
But the online swarm is an amoral organism that doesn't have much use for clubby gentlemen's agreements. A full 40 minutes before NBC announced the news, somebody else updated Russert's main Wikipedia entry, indicating his date of death, and changed everything to the past tense.
The network was not amused, especially after the change was tracked to the offices of IBS, an improbably named company that does subcontracting work for NBC's broadcast operations. The change was quickly undone by someone at IBS – who switched everything back into the present tense – but it was too late. It was reported this week that an IBS employee was fired for breaking the embargo.
Some have started a campaign of righteous indignation that a man, irrespective of his employment, would be punished for doing what any upright netizen should do, and use whatever means of transmission are available to spread interesting information far and wee.
The story caught my attention for a few reasons. It's a retelling, of course, of the familiar parable about information refusing to stay put. More to the point, though, I also saw the updated Wikipedia article before NBC made its announcement – because I was busy doing much the same thing.
Alerted by The New York Times website (which also mentioned Russert's death a few minutes before NBC did), I visited Wikipedia – partly out of interest about Russert and partly out of a vague and morbid curiosity about how long it would take for his death to register. The change, of course, had already been made to the main entry. But when I visited the Wikipedia page of Meet The Press, the flagship political show he helmed on Sundays, I found it in pristine condition.
Why I was compelled to be the one to change it, I couldn't tell you, but that's what I did. I added a “2008” as an ending date on his tenure at the show. I changed everything else to the past tense. And I did so post-haste.
I don't know if the impulse was the same as the one that compelled that NBC subcontractor to go out and kill Tim Russert on Wikipedia. But I can tell you that it didn't stem from a desire to make sure that the public was well-informed.
No, it was more like the primal instinct that makes people shout “First!” on online forums, a recognition of the improbable act of stumbling across a special place at just the right time. After I had done my duty, dozens of others piled on, tweaking, retweaking, fixing and updating until my work was moot. But I got to that particular page first, and that left me ever-so-slightly chuffed.
How ridiculous. What is it about breaking news that can turn bemused onlookers into frothing fan-boys? The ability to edit Wikipedia should have lost its thrill by now. People having been fraudulently offing each other on Wikipedia for ages; the comic Sinbad appeared on the public radar for the first time in years when he had to insist that his Wikipedia page exaggerated reports of his own demise. A British Web magazine called B3ta.com ran a competition last year to see whose virtual celebrity assassination would last the longest on Wikipedia. But those were just diversions.
The action is in writing history as it happens. As Noam Cohen of the Times observed, Wikipedia guarantees its readers a large audience. There's no shortage of ways to publish things online, most of which will start with readerships of precisely zero. The Internet gives everybody the power to be ignored. But editing a Wikipedia page that's at the heart of a breaking news story will affect thousands upon thousands of readers.
The thing is, Wikipedia isn't really about history at all. It's actually a creature of the moment. It might be spotty on historical details, but it's the best answer we have to the question, “Where do things stand right now?” Who's alive? Who's dead? Is the Burj Dubai finished yet? What happened on the last episode of Lost? It's not so much an encyclopedia as a registry of – and I use this word with some trepidation – reality. It's an ever-changing ledger book of where things stand in our universe. And being the one to register momentous news in the ledger of life is like being God's secretary.
This may or may not have been exactly what Jimmy Wales had in mind when he started Wikipedia those years ago. This probably wasn't what that benighted soul had in mind when he prematurely killed Tim Russert on Wikipedia. But the lure of being the one to update the accounts on reality will have people clamouring to yell “first” for as long as they have the option.
