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He appended a Covid-19 in popular culture section to the end of the article, which was left mostly blank, save for a few lines about the certainty of impending works of art that would reference the pandemic. Fellow editors immediately disputed the section, citing a lack of substance. I said, Just hang on, this is going to fill in, Wyatt said. If you think about the plague of the Middle Ages and how much literature and culture references the plague again now, this is a category we can create in advance because we know its going to fill out. And thats what happened. Indeed, it grew so big that it became its own article.

In his essay on Wikipedias relationship to breaking news, Brian Keegan notes the prodigious detail of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack article in the months following the event. There was even a list of the nearly 3,000 casualties by name, location, and civilian status. Editors started to argue that the fastidiousness was unbecoming of the traditional encyclopedia that Wikipedia was trying to emulate stylistically, and eventually portions of the entry disappeared.

That Wikipedia articles can spring into existence overnight, grow, and then contract again, reflects the peculiar vicissitudes of record-keeping in the digital age. Because the online encyclopedia is living and breathing, it is bound to the present. Gradually, as the community comes to understand [the pandemic] with a macro perspective, two, three, five, 10 years out, some of those subpages will be deleted, or theyll be merged, Stinson said. The Tourism in Zanzibar page, for instance, may one day forgo its Covid-19 reference, especially if theres a surviving, comprehensive article about the pandemics effects on global tourism.

Wikimedia archives all deleted pages, of course, which is why Stephen Harrison, writing in Slate, astutely observed that todays Wikipedia revisions [will] become a historical artifact for future scholars studying this period.

Continued here:
Wikipedia's Sprawling, Awe-Inspiring Coverage of the Pandemic - The New Republic