The Editors
I finished reading "The Editors" by Stephen Harrison, and I really enjoyed it. The novel follows some crucial moments of Infopendium, a free, editable online encyclopedia with mostly anonymous contributors. The setting is a fictionalized version of Wikipedia, and set around the beginning of the COVID pandemic.
The author is a journalist who has covered Wikipedia before, and now has written a fictional novel. It's not a roman à clef - the events described here have not happened for Wikipedia, even though some of the characters feel very much inspired by real Wikipedia contributors. I constantly had people I know playing the roles of DejaNu, Prospero, DocMirza, and Telos in my inner cinema. And as the book continued I found myself apologizing in my mind to the real people, because they would never act as in the book.
There were some later scenes I had a lot of trouble to suspend disbelief for, but it's hard to say which ones without spoiling too much. Also, I'm very glad that the real world Wikipedia is far more technically robust than Infopendium seems to be.
I recommend reading it. It offers a fictional entrypoint to ideas like edit wars, systemic bias, the pushback to it, anonymous collaboration, community values, sock puppets, conflict of interest, paid editing, and more, and I found it also a good yarn, with a richly woven plot. Thanks for the book!
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