Founded amid the throbbing excitement of the first dot-com boom, it’s a shard of the utopian internet now embedded in the informational dystopia of present-day America. While Wikipedians were able to contain this particular explosion of the culture wars into a milquetoast paragraph, Wikipedia finds itself in a strange place these days. The Times stated that it had reviewed her social media history before hiring her, and that it did not condone the posts. Critics characterized her tweets as being racist Jeong said that the posts were “counter- trolling” in reaction to harassment she had experienced, and that she regretted adopting that tactic. The hiring sparked a strongly negative reaction in conservative media and social media, which highlighted derogatory tweets about white people that Jeong had posted mostly in 20. In August 2018, Jeong was hired by The New York Times to join its editorial board as lead writer on technology, commencing in September. Eventually, hundreds of messages and proposals later, a temporary conclusion was reached, and the following text was added to Jeong’s biography:
Editors also discussed whether to flat-out call the tweets racist or to adopt some other adjective (inflammatory, perhaps). Debate about the noteworthiness of the topic went on for days and thousands of words. Others pointed out that dozens of news organizations, including gold-standard ones in the Wikipedia community like the BBC, had covered her tweets. Some editors argued that Wikipedia should not act like a news site, trying to include up-to-the-minute updates. In this case, the warring over Jeong became a proxy battle over the inclusion of any mention of the tweets. They try to stay away from “ presentism.” They’ve tried to create objective standards (of importance, say) for including facts about people.Īs in a formal debate, all these rules can be marshaled to support a variety of conclusions about what should or should not be in an article about Sweden or donuts or somebody’s biography. For example, Wikipedians maintain that they must maintain an NPOV, or Neutral Point of View. These rules are arcane and quite specific to Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s internal rules guide debates about what content belongs in articles, and how events can be described. After her hiring, these tweets were picked up by right-wing media as proof of her “racism.” The battle over including these tweets in her Wikipedia bio has been the subject of a brutal edit war, which is like a grim national-politics-level recapitulation of the old, funny Wikipedia wars about cow-tipping, hummus, and Nikola Tesla.
Over the years, Jeong has angrily and colorfully tweeted hundreds of times about her frustrations with white people (“ Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins” “ oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy i get out of being cruel to old white men”). The ever-widening maelstrom surrounding tweets by Sarah Jeong, the latest hire by the New York Times editorial board, may consume all the atoms in the known universe, and as Wikipedia is of this world, it, too, must be a place to immortalize (or attempt to immortalize) Jeong as racist.
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