Joe’s adventures with Wikipedia mediation has gotten me thinking about Wikipedia editing more and I ended up deciding to get involved in editing / watching a few articles. Among other articles, I spent some time editing a page on Taraz – a city in Kazakhstan where I spent a lot of time in my childhood. When I came across it, the article was surprisingly long but highly incoherent, much of it not even quite in English. It appears that at some point someone had pasted in a bunch of text sloppily translated from Russian, without bothering to even put paragraph breaks. Since then, others have edited the text and improved it significantly, but it still looked like a mess. I didn’t have the patience to edit the whole history section, but decided to try editing a brief three paragraph summary to make it seem like a coherent story. A few comments on this.

I am not a historian of Central Asia, so it was all based on tertiary sources.I followed a the Wikipedia page itself and a few historical articles in Russian found on the web. “Verifying” what those said is of course a matter of finding corroborating sources dealing with related topics. E.g., if an article mentions that a Chinese traveler visiting the city, one can at least verify that such a traveler went to Central Asia around that time. In this particular case, much of the work is simply matching up names: if the original article mentioned the city being visited by “Syuan Tszyn”, it takes some familiarity with both Russian and English transliterations of Chinese names to figure out that “Syuan Tszyn” really means Xuánzàng. It takes some searching for other sources to discover that “Dizabul” is really Istämi. Compared to that, mapping “Zemarkha Kililyskyi” onto Zemarchus is no effort at all.

What’s interesting, however, is how adding those links makes the article appear so much more credible, in a truly Latourian way. A skeptic might suspect that Chinese traveler “Syuan Tszyn” was just made up by some crazy Wikipedia contributor, but doubting the existence of Xuánzàng is somehow harder, as it is “backed up” by an extensive Wikipedia article. The reference to Xuánzàng in the article on Taraz of course adds another ounce of credibility to his existence: if you doubt that Xuánzàng existed, just look at all the Wikipedia articles linking to him! The articles thus corroborate each other in a strange circular way. If you doubt that the article on Taraz is well researched, consider that Xuánzàng, Dizaboul Istämi, Zemarchus and other characters that appear in it – Justinian I, Menander Protector, Al-Muqaddasi, Chagatai Khan – are all “real"Xiangyang historical people, supported by their very own Wikipedia articles. Every wiki link is thus another "deleted modality”, another move towards making of a “fact”. Some other characters, such as “Zhambyl Zhabayev”, “Chanyu Zhizhi”, “Satuk Bugra Khan”, or “General Chernyshev” are yet to gain that status. Who knows if they ever existed… Just give me time, however, and Chanyu Zhizhi will become just as real as Justinian I!