Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age by Heather Ford

Facts do not come to us on their own. They often require an entire host of individuals, meanings, and materials to help them survive the terrain of information and arrive in front of us either as a summary on Wikipedia, a network graph on Wikidata, or a brief statement on a Google knowledge card. This argument is at the core of Heather Ford’s examination of a set of facts that became attached to the Wikipedia article titled “2011 Egyptian Revolution.” Through a combination of interviews, media-sensitive readings of Wikipedian edits, and data, Ford examines the life cycle of the fact of the revolution as it circulated on the web. Her deep knowledge of Wikipedia and the Internet (as both an insider and a researcher) is put on display throughout the book as she effortlessly weaves the minutiae of Wikipedian practices into the broader processes of datafication that currently shape our encounters with information.

The first chapter is written in a lucid and accessible style that enables Ford to clearly articulate her feminist sociotechnical theory of facts. She argues that instead of statements of “truth,” facts are definable as statements put forward as “representative” of objective reality. Whether or not these statements are accepted as a representation of reality is determined by the legitimacy of the actions of human “allies” and nonhuman “companions” that make the facts “stable.” The stability of a fact is a fundamental concern for Ford. Without this material and social support, facts on their own cannot survive the information “terrain” as they move and circulate between different epistemological communities. This focus on the movement of facts between communities is the book’s guiding logic.

After providing some background for the initial political crisis, Ford follows a core group of Wikipedians to see how they prepared and maintained the article “2011 Egyptian Revolution” through four phases of genesis, eruption, escalation, and surge. Each of these phases is then represented in its own subsequent chapter. In line with her theoretical terminology, these chapters account for the interactions between textual companions, technical companions, and the recruitment of Wikipedian editors and journalistic allies. Ford reconstructs how the fact of the protests survived those early days of uncertainty and coalesced as a new fact: the “2011 Egyptian Revolution.” By outlining the alliance-making practices and the activist framing of the event, Ford confirms a secondary argument of her book: Wikipedia does not simply reflect information from academic, scientific, and journalistic sources; instead, it cocreates and stabilizes facts so that they survive in the form of Wikipedian articles. But survival, according to Ford, also means traversing the terrain of other communities. This is where her analysis of Wikipedia is unique.

Previous books about Wikipedia (such as those by Joseph Reagle, Dariusz Jemielniak, and Thomas Leitch) have tended to demonstrate the site’s importance by explaining collaborative practices within the encyclopedia.¹ Instead, Ford’s focus on the circulation of facts requires her to move outside the platform. In doing so, the book shifts toward a fruitful and valuable critique of the relationship between data and facts. In the penultimate chapter, she explores how the external pressures of datafication resulted in the creation of the Wikidata project. With the goal of standardizing the relationships between Wikipedian content by attaching it to the companion of metadata, Ford explains how the fact of the “2011 Egyptian Revolution” was subsequently decoupled from Wikipedians’ labor in the process of making Wikipedian facts platform-ready for corporations like Google to freely use for their own profit-driven services. In the final moment of the fact’s life cycle, she explains how the fact of the revolution found its way to Google’s citation-free knowledge cards. Through this moment of translation, which ensures the survival of the fact into the datafied terrain of the corporate web, Ford critiques both Wikidata and Google for the removal of context, the invisibility of Wikipedian labor, and the opaque treatment of data that limits the ability to contest the representativeness of facts.

In taking the book as a whole, one cannot help but notice the symmetry of her critique. Throughout the text, Ford continually reminds the reader of her personal relationships with the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikipedians she interviewed. These are not merely interesting details. They are theoretically consistent with her feminist approach, which finds the scholar situating herself as an ally of the facts that she has written into the book. Such a deep commitment to context not only makes her retelling of a Wikipedian article meaningful but also serves as an alternative model to the style of decontextualized facts that make datafication economically valuable—and epistemologically suspect.

While the book’s arguments are well crafted, there is one minor element that may irk historians of information. Ford claims that since Wikipedians wrote an encyclopedic article about breaking news, they are exceptional, because traditional print encyclopedias “only included events from the distant past” (33). This statement overlooks how being “up-to-date” is one of the historical concerns of encyclopedias, as seen in the Encyclopedia Britannica’s annual Year Book, specifically written to provide encyclopedic accounts about recent events. As such, while encyclopedists producing articles about breaking news is unique, these Wikipedian practices are otherwise continuous with—and not divergences from—their predecessors. While a more critical reflection on the history of encyclopedias would be welcomed, this inaccuracy does not negate the coherency, clarity, and relevance of Ford’s theory of survivable facts. Truly, Ford provides a foundational example of how to examine a theory of information by exploring it through the history of specific Wikipedia articles, a method that others should surely follow. Lastly, given the accessibility of her writing and the utility of her concepts of allies, companions, and terrain, I suggest that the first chapter will be extremely useful for researchers and teachers of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and democratic theories of information. She has demonstrated why we should follow not only the facts but also the company they keep.

—Steve Jankowski, University of Amsterdam

1.Joseph Michael Reagle, Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010); Dariusz Jemielniak, Common Knowledge? An Ethnography of Wikipedia (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014); Thomas M. Leitch, Wikipedia U: Knowledge, Authority, and Liberal Education in the Digital Age (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).