Annie Rauwerda

Asterisk: You’re famous for the Depths of Wikipedia account, where you share factoids from some of the most arcane, interesting, and surprising pages on Wikipedia. But you’re also now a part of the broader Wikipedia community. How did you first get interested in the site, and how has your involvement changed over time? 

Annie Rauwerda: I started back in high school editing typos and adding things that I noticed were missing — like items to lists. But I had never done anything more than that because I was afraid of it because there are so many rules. Like, I’d seen the talk pages. And many of Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines and essays are very wordy.

Then I started the account — even though I felt a little like a phony. But I remember the first time I felt really excited about the Wikipedia community was when I got on a call with the president of Wikimedia, New York City, back in 2020. And she had told me about a guy named Jim who retired from working at the phone company. He worked in that big AT&T building that doesn’t have windows. I don’t know exactly what he did in there — but cables and stuff. Anyway, he’s retired now, and he spends all day biking around New York City and taking photos of infrastructure for Wikipedia, because Google Maps photos — and so many other photos — aren’t freely licensed. And I was like, that’s amazing.

So I kept hearing about more and more individual people and their shticks. There are a lot of generalists who edit Wikipedia, but there’s something so endearing about the people who have just one thing. That’s the first time I got excited. That was when I was brave enough to start making bolder changes and writing my own articles. 

A: Wikipedia’s tagline is the “free encyclopedia, created and edited by volunteers around the world,” which makes it sound like a cohesive, happy little family. But as you alluded to, there’s a lot of rules. It’s intimidating to write articles. Is it actually the case that there is a Wikipedia community, or is it more accurate to talk about communities within Wikipedia?

AR: The answer is both, of course, but when people talk about Wikipedia as a decision making entity, usually they’re talking about 300 people — the people that weigh in to the very serious and (in my opinion) rather arcane, boring, arduous discussions. There’s not that many of them. 

There are also a lot of islands. There is one woman who mostly edits about hamsters, and always on her phone. She has never interacted with anyone else. Who is she? She’s not part of any community that we can tell.

But then there are hundreds of thousands of editors on English Wikipedia. And within that there are very specific communities that are really interesting. There’s the military history WikiProject. Maybe this makes sense because of the whole military thing, but they are very hierarchical. They have a lot of rules. They’re very efficient in reviewing articles. Also Wikipedia has a pretty outdated rating system for articles — one of which just got deprecated when “Featured Articles” and “Good Articles” became a thing — except for in military history, because that community was like, well, we need to have every level. 

The same thing is true of the tropical cyclones community. They also do a lot of reviewing, and they also tend to skew very young. It’s a lot of teenage boys in tropical cyclones. There’s also a very strong anti-vandal community, who similarly skew very young. 

A: Before I had Wikipedia friends, I did not really understand how many different silos there were.

AR: So many. There are acronyms that I hear that I do not know. The anti-vandal people especially are really off in their own world. One of the most effective, consistent, long serving anti-vandalism patrollers is not a teenager. He’s a PhD-level material scientist who used to write very high quality articles about chemicals. And then he just got too upset about vandalism and decided “I have to devote hours of my life — even though I have a family and a really demanding job — to this.”

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No one knows exactly how a war would unfold, only that the sort of “bolt from the blue” surprise attack around which all three great nuclear powers have built their deterrent structures is unlikely because of the strength of those very structures. The critical challenge now is not how to ward off a sneak attack but how to control an escalation that occurs in plain sight — for instance, a conventional conflict that goes wrong, leading to nuclear saber rattling, leading to the first use of a few small nuclear weapons on the battlefield, leading to the counteruse of small nuclear weapons, leading to much of the world sliding uncontrollably into extinction.

The best available model of such an event is an ultrasecret 1983 Pentagon war game called Proud Prophet. That game was a nuclear test of sorts, and it provided critical lessons that remain crucial today. It was unique in that by design it was largely unscripted, involved the highest levels of the U.S. military and its global warfighting commands and used actual communication channels, doctrines and secret war plans. One of its great strengths was that unlike any other war game involving the possibility of small-yield nuclear weapons, it ran freely and was allowed to play out to its natural conclusion: global devastation.

The conclusion was a shock. The lesson drawn from it — that nuclear war cannot be controlled — had a decades-long effect on American strategy and therefore, in a world of opposing mirrors, on global strategies. It may be that someday in the future a survivor will be able to look back at our times and observe that the greatest tragedy in all of human history is that among current leaders in Russia and the United States, and perhaps other countries, the lesson was forgotten.

History shows that deterrence often fails and that countries can maneuver themselves into corners where they have no choice but to enter into wars they cannot win, wars of assured self-destruction. Now we are entering an era where nuclear arms control is an open question, nonproliferation has failed, conventional conflicts are spreading, overwrought nationalism is on the rise, the use of small nuclear weapons again seems possible, deterrence is weakening and fools dream of managing nuclear escalation in the midst of battle. Nuclear war in some form seems to be coming to the neighborhood. There is little sign that changes are being pursued to lower the risk. There is no reason to panic, but Katie, bar the door.

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posted by f.sheikh

The Question of Palestine was published in 1979, one year after Said’s pivotal book Orientalism and two before Covering Islam—a trilogy that helped found post-colonial theory and develop a framework to critique the West’s stereotypical and often racist lens of the Arab and Muslim world. The Question of Palestine was particularly noteworthy for being the first English-language book to narrate the Palestinian experience and deconstruct Zionism as a settler-colonial project.

It remains an essential read from arguably the most influential Palestinian-American scholar to have lived. Reading it today brings reflections on how everything and nothing has changed, as Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza, its bombing of Lebanon, and annexation of the West Bank continue. That is why a new re-issue of this book is so timely. In the UK, Fitzcarraldo Editions’ re-issue will be published on November 21, with a new preface by literary critic (and Said’s nephew) Saree Makdisi, plus an added chapter titled “The One-State Solution”, which Said wrote for The New York Times in 1999. For American audiences, Said’s seminal trilogy will be re-printed in new editions by Vintage Books and available imminently.

Edward Said died at 67 in September 2003 after a long battle with leukaemia. He had two children: law professor Wadie Said, and actor, writer, and activist Najla Said. Both were children when The Question of Palestine was published, but they recounted what it was like to grow up in New York with the Palestinian-American Columbia professor, and how his book holds up 45 years later.

“After a year plus of what’s been happening in Gaza and now Lebanon, I think people are going to need more critical knowledge and more of a deeper understanding of what has happened before”, Najla told me. She cited how westerners who start getting interested in Palestine tend to first go for the works publishers tend to promote—books by Ilan Pappé or Noam Chomsky, or Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. Although these are all important works, she said that her father was really the first writer to speak out about all this in English, and readers ought to go to the source material.

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The artist and activist Nan Goldin makes no secret of her views about Israel and the wars in Gaza and Lebanon.

She has signed high-profile protest letters calling Israel’s actions in Gaza “a genocide.” She has marched with pro-Palestinian protesters and was arrested at a demonstration in New York. In a magazine interview last year, she said she had “been on a cultural boycott of Israel for my whole life.”

So a major exhibition of Goldin’s photo slide shows and films that opened over the weekend at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin seemed like a high-profile anomaly in Germany, where lawmakers have said that support for boycotting Israel is antisemitic, and where artists who have taken positions like Goldin’s have had museum shows canceled, prizes suspended and talks shut down.

But none of those artists were as famous or influential as Goldin, who has been an art-world star for decades.

“If an artist in my position is allowed to express their political stance without being canceled,” she said in a speech at the show’s public opening, “I hope I will be paving a path for other artists to speak out without being censored.” Goldin, who is Jewish and American, accused Germans of conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism and looking away from the horrors unfolding in Gaza, which she repeatedly described as a genocide.

Tension built throughout the 17-minute speech, during which members of the public shouted an anti-Israel slogan, and its conclusion set off a reaction in the museum hall that snowballed in the news media.

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posted by f.sheikh