Revenge, ego and the corruption of Wikipedia
The unmasking of a writer who took extraordinary advantage of online anonymity to pursue old vendettas
Topics: Barry Hannah, Jimmy Wales, Qworty, Robert Clark Young, sock puppets, wikipedia, Writers, Technology News, Business News
In the wee hours of the morning of January 27, 2013, a Wikipedia editor named “Qworty” made a series of 14 separate edits to the Wikipedia page for the late writer Barry Hannah, a well-regarded Southern author with a taste for the Gothic and absurd.
Qworty cut paragraphs that included quotes from Hannah’s work. He removed 20 links to interviews, obituaries and reminiscences concerning Hannah. He cut out a list of literary prizes Hannah had won.
Two edits stand out. Qworty excised the phrase “and was regarded as a good mentor” from a sentence that started: “Hannah taught creative writing for 28 years at the University of Mississippi, where he was director of its M.F.A. program …” And he changed the cause of Hannah’s death from “natural causes” to “alcoholism.” But Hannah’s obituaries stated that he had died of a heart attack and been clean and sober for years before his death, while his role as a mentor was testified to in numerous memorials. (Another editor later removed the alcoholism edit.)
Taken all together, the edits strongly suggest a focused attempt to diminish Hannah’s legacy. But why? Who was Qworty and what axe did he have to grind with Hannah?
The answer to this question is on the one hand simple, almost trivial: Qworty turned out to be another author who had a long history of resenting Hannah. The late night Wikipedia edits are certainly not the first time that a writer’s ego has led to mischief. But the story is also important. Wikipedia is one of the jewels in the Internet’s crown, an amazing collective achievement, a mighty stab at realizing an awesome dream: a constantly updated repository for all human knowledge. It is created from the bottom up, a crowd-sourced labor of love by people who require no compensation for their work but also don’t need to jump through any qualifying hoops. Anyone can edit Wikipedia. Just create an account and start messing around!
Qworty’s edits undermine our faith in this great project. Qworty’s edits prove that Wikipedia’s content can be shaped by people settling grudges and acting out of spite and envy. Qworty alone, by his own account, has made 13,000 edits to Wikipedia. And Qworty, as the record will show, is not to be trusted.
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Qworty first came to my attention in late April, when I discovered that he was responsible for a series of “revenge edits” to Wikipedia pages associated with the writer Amanda Filipacchi. Filipacchi had made a big splash with her widely read New York Times op-ed identifying a pattern of sexist editing at the online encyclopedia. Qworty’s edits were an obvious act of retaliation. In my piece, I called out two disturbing outbursts made by Qworty in different Wikipedia discussion forums, cries of rage that revealed a level of high emotion one does not normally associate with sober encyclopedia writing.
In the parlance of Wikipedia, “revenge edits” are modifications to a Wikipedia page motivated by anger. They are acts of punishment. Such behavior is officially considered bad form by the larger Wikipedia “community,” but given Wikipedia’s commitment to anonymity and general decentralized structure, it is a practice that is very difficult to stamp out.
In the aftermath of the Filipacchi episode, Qworty did not lack for defenders. Qworty, like many other Wikipedia editors, took seriously his responsibility to root out what he considered self promotion, unjustifiable praise or outright puffery. Just the facts, ma’am! He described himself, on his own Wikipedia user page, as particularly focused on identifying and fixing “articles with potential conflicts of interest.” Wherever he found people manipulating Wikipedia to their own advantage, he would intervene.
On Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’ Talk page, some Wikipedia editors argued that Qworty’s actions in the Filipacchi affair were entirely proper. What’s more, even if he did occasionally go overboard, the subsequent public attention on the results of his over-enthusiasm would rectify affairs. That’s how Wikipedia works, the argument goes. Whenever focus turns to some hitherto lightly-visited Wikipedia backwater, it is not unusual for a flurry of editors to arrive to scrub everything clean and bring it all up to proper snuff. The endlessly iterative Wikipedia rights itself in the end.
But two weeks after my story was published, a group of Wikipedia editors affiliated with the Wikipedia criticism site Wikipediocracy approached me. After weeks of research, these editors were convinced that they had identified Qworty as a novelist who had long been surreptitiously editing his own Wikipedia page — and was guilty of his own multiple instances of self-puffery. Not only was Qworty guilty of revenge editing, they argued, but he was also a raging hypocrite! A conflict-of-interest cop who had initially created a Wikipedia account for the sole purpose of pursuing his own self-interest.
The writer they identified is Robert Clark Young, author of the 1999 novel “One of the Guys.” After reviewing their research and doing some of my own reporting, I thought there was enough evidence to go on to pursue the story. On Tuesday, May 14, I contacted Young on Facebook. We chatted for 15 minutes or so. He categorically denied any connection to Qworty.
“I know nothing of how Wikipedia is edited and have never had an account there,” Young told me. “I’m afraid that I am so tech-deficient that I wouldn’t even know how to open one.”
Young’s denial was so whole-hearted it made me doubt the case against him. Perhaps he was actually exactly what he claimed to be, an utterly non-tech-savvy writer who has in the past few years dedicated himself primarily to taking care of his elderly, ill parents.
And yet at the same time, Qworty and Young were clearly connected. Not only did Qworty have a long history of close involvement with editing Young’s page, but I found that he had a long record of negatively editing the pages of writers that Young had had disputes with in the past. With the help of Wikipediocracy, I discovered a real-world story here that went at least as far back as 2001, when Robert Clark Young participated in a well-known writer’s workshop at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in Tennessee. A workshop that was led by none other than Barry Hannah.
According to one eyewitness account, Young’s work was not well received at that workshop. So one theory for Qworty’s mysterious edits was that he was working out old grudges. His Wikipedia edits were an online mirror of off-line vendettas. I dug deeper, and as the week progressed I continued to press Young with further questions.
On Thursday morning, about 48 hours after I first contacted Young, Qworty published a dramatic manifesto on his user page at Wikipedia. Titled “Who is Qworty?” the essay declared Qworty to be “a schtick … an entertainment, an annoyance, a distraction, a put-on, a reading experience, a performance, a series of ironies, an inversion that you do or do not get. ”
“Wikipedia is the great postmodern novel,” declared Qworty. “Wikipedia is ‘not truth’ … Wikipedia, like any other text, is not reality.”
Those of us who depend on Wikipedia as a source of neutral, accurate information might find some cause for alarm in the fact that an editor responsible for 13,000 edits believes Wikipedia is a postmodern novel. But ironically, the closer one examines the trail of evidence left behind by Qworty, the stronger his case seems! If truth is messy, then Wikipedia is even messier.
I told Young later that morning that I was more convinced than ever that he was Qworty. A few hours later, he responded to me with a baffling sequence of messages that at first made no sense. Eventually, I realized that he had confused me with someone else, and in doing so, had seriously contradicted some of his earlier assertions. A few hours later, at 4 p.m. Pacific time, Young told me on Facebook that he had posted a statement on his Wikipedia page. The jig was up. Qworty admitted that he was “Bob Young.”
In my experience, mysteries rarely wrap themselves up so neatly. But solving the question of Qworty’s true identity doesn’t end this story. In his confession, Qworty claimed that “All of my edits have been in accordance with Wikipedia policy.” This is hard to square with many of his edits to the pages of other writers and, in particular, his strenuous efforts to hide his own identity when editing his own page. Qworty has also been at the center of scores of disputes over the years. He has even come to the angry attention of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales on at least three separate occasions. As far back as 2010, Wales told Qworty that “You have been warned many times in the past about civility violations and so I know you know better.”
Qworty has destructively edited the pages of other writers. He has made numerous edits to his own page while obsessively hiding his true identity. And yet there have never been any significant consequences for his actions. For those of us who love Wikipedia, the ramifications of the Qworty saga are not comforting: If Qworty has been allowed to run free for so long — sabotaging the “truth” however he sees fit, writing his own postmodern novel — how many others are also creating spiteful havoc under the hood, where no one is watching?
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Before we get to the nitty gritty of how Qworty was exposed, let’s spend some time in the real world of Robert Clark Young. The first paragraph of Young’s Wikipedia page finishes with the line: “Young has been involved in several high-profile issues through the fiction and journalistic articles he has written.”
For our purposes here, the most noteworthy of these “high-profile issues” was a ferocious assault launched by Young against the Alabama writer Brad Vice, along with nearly everyone else associated with the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, published in the pages of the New York Press in December 2005.
At the time Brad Vice was an up-and-coming writer who had made a very bad mistake. In one of his short stories, “Tuscaloosa Knights,” he included, without attribution, passages from an autobiographical non-fiction work by Carl Carmer, a writer who is an icon of sorts for the Alabama literary community. The discovery of what many saw as a clear case of plagiarism created a huge stink. Vice’s first collection of stories was pulped by his publisher (although it was later reissued in slightly revised form).
An argument can be made that Vice’s “plagiarism” was actually a convoluted, postmodernish homage to Carmer. A fierce and lengthy battle broke out in the Southern literary community over just exactly how big a sin Vice had committed. Vice is teaching at the University of West Bohemia in the Czech Republic and declined to revisit with me what he considers the most painful part of his life. But how one judges Brad Vice isn’t really pertinent to this story. What we do know for sure is that Robert Clark Young devoted a significant amount of intellectual and emotional energy to attacking not just Vice, but the entire community of writers centered around the Sewanee Writers’ Conference that had nurtured Vice.
In his New York Press diatribe, Young described the Sewanee writers as a bunch of back-scratchers who “go about coloring one another’s Easter eggs and then filling one another’s baskets.” He reserved special vehemence for Barry Hannah, “the conference’s Godfather, the ailing patriarch who sits in an overstuffed chair in the conference bookstore, too weak to stand, the youngsters kneeling before him as he signs books.”
“While Hannah’s posterior is arguably the most prominent one available for the ambitious lips that gather at Sewanee,” wrote Young, “Vice was prolific in giving positive strokes to anyone at the conference who could have been of use to him.”
But perhaps the most important passage is one which named no writers at all, but just described the conference.
Over those 12 days, many of the South’s leading writers will congregate here. They will decide which of the conference’s attendees should be considered for future scholarships to the conference, which writers should receive letters of recommendation to graduate programs, which hot new novelists should receive blurbs, which conference attendees should be nominated for inclusion in “New Stories From the South,” and which book-length manuscripts might make good candidates for next year’s Flannery O’Connor Award in Short Fiction. In addition to deciding which writers will be rewarded with career boosts, they will decide which writers will be greeted at the conference with indifference or official silence or, even worse, a coordinated workshop attack.
The emphasis is mine. Because one relevant piece of data that Young probably should have included in his broadside was the fact that in the summer of 2001, Young had been a guest fellow at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, where he had both given a reading and participated in a workshop co-taught by Barry Hannah.
In the eruption of online commentary that Young’s article provoked, a longtime Sewanee staffer, novelist Leah Stewart, pointed out Young’s omission. Acknowledging that she was “one of the Sewanee insiders Young so despises,” Stewart wrote that “I don’t even begin to recognize the version of Sewanee Young paints, and I can’t help but feel that that description, and his vendetta against Brad Vice, are colored by the fact that his work was poorly received at the conference, both in the workshop and at the reading he gave.”
I contacted Stewart this week, and she confirmed to me via email her account of the Sewanee workshop. Young/Qworty later contended that comments such as Stewart’s were part of a “smear campaign” carried out by Vice’s friends. That possibility cannot be ruled out of hand, but one has to wonder: Did Young consider himself to be a victim of a “coordinated workshop attack” at Sewanee? And did he vow revenge?
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So much for the real world, where writers have been getting pissed off at other writers and taking their vengeance via the poison pen since the days when cuneiform was the dominant communications medium. Now let’s move to the online world of Wikipedia, where the same pettiness and spite runs rampant, only cloaked in pseudonyms and hidden in palimpsest-like layers. Let’s put aside Robert Clark Young for the moment, and focus on Qworty.
Qworty’s very first action as a Wikipedia editor, barely five minutes after he created his account on March 10, 2007, was to archive the Talk page devoted to Robert Clark Young’s Wikipedia page.
Talk pages are where Wikipedia editors hash out their differences on what should be included in the text of a Wikipedia article. If you are a savvy Wikipedia user, and you doubt the accuracy or sourcing of some element in a particular article, it is often quite useful to inspect the Talk page to see what people have been fighting about. Talk pages show how the sausage gets made. Talk pages, just like actual Wikipedia articles, can also be edited — conversations about content can be removed, as well as the content itself. It is to Wikipedia’s great credit that not only is every single previous version of every Wikipedia article preserved for all time, but so too are all the versions of all the discussions about those pages.
Archiving a Talk page doesn’t get rid of it entirely; it just makes the page one more click distant from the curious reader. The usual justification for archiving a page is that it has gotten too long and unwieldy and out of date. Years of old discussions make it difficult to find more recent discussions of pertinent matters. But archiving a page is also a way of hiding it, of adding one more level of obscurity to issues that someone might prefer left out of the public eye.
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