Hi! My name is Nathaniel James, and I'm in the early phases of writing a book tentatively titled How to Build a Fact: the Wikipedia Paradox and the Perilous Future of Knowledge. Right now, I am outlining the research project component and producing a proposal in hopes of attracting agents and, ultimately, a contract with a publishing house. I will use this user page to provide more information and status updates and will be reaching out to many Wikipedians, Wikimedians, and Wikidatans (is that a thing yet) as I can regarding the specific stories I hope to tell.
Fun fact: I wrote my master's thesis on Wikipedia in 2006. It was titled “Social Interaction on Wikipedia.org: A Social Network Analysis of Article Talk Pages.”
Another fact, for transparency and to reinforce how interested I am in all things Wikipedia: I did some professional writing work on contract with The Wikimedia Foundation in 2019.
I live in Seattle, WA and make my living as a writer and consultant focusing on Executive Communications (think speechwriting, but more), Facilitation and Governance, and Program Design and Development services. I typically work with national and international STEM Nonprofits, but have also worked in the arts, media, public policy, and even briefly with a finance industry client.
UPDATE 1, posted in Miscellaneous on Village Pump:
Book project, request for input - How to Build a Fact: The Wikipedia Paradox and the Perilous Future of Knowledge. edit
Greetings, Wikipedians! I hope this finds you well, despite our challenging circumstances. My name is Nathaniel James, and I’m researching and writing a book that I hope will be of interest to the community and which will require some participation by lots of community members to be a success.
The working title for my book is How to Build a Fact: The Wikipedia Paradox and the Perilous Future of Knowledge. Is it a book about Wikipedia? I prefer to say that Wikipedia is a central character (or even setting) in a story I want to tell about the history of factual knowledge going back to The Enlightenment; how we produce, distribute, and protect factual knowledge now; and the multiple crises and opportunities factual knowledge faces as we march towards the future. The first part will be about the French Encyclopédie of the period leading up to their Revolution; the second will look closely at Wikipedia, with a special emphasis on the Global Warming article (and now, likely, COVID-19 related articles); and the final part will look at Wikidata and efforts like MIT’s Knowledge Futures Group, contrasting them with corporate initiatives like Google’s Knowledge Graph and others.
While I’m very likely to request interviews with some of the publicly known figures of the movement, I think the book will be most successful when it gives readers a really solid snapshot of the community, so I want to privilege the stories of more “everyday” contributors as much as possible.
If you have experience/expertise with any of the broad areas outlined above and want to be in touch early, I’ll be keeping an eye on this Village Pump thread, and you can also reach out to me on the user page I set up for this project. I will do my very best to be responsive; please just know that I’m doing this on top of paid work, and each stage of the project will require a different particular focus.
I am in the proposal writing stage, which means two things. 1) I’m at the “framing the narrative arc” level of research, rather drilling into details (more on those details below). 2) For my first sample chapter for the proposal, I am drilling into the details on the effort to put a copy of English Wikipedia on the Moon. I believe that story will capture the imagination of a broad audience and allow me to touch on all or most of the major themes I’m developing. I may use it as a prologue.
FYI, my intention for now is to go the traditional agent-publishing house route.
Over time, I will be reaching out to editor groups via talk pages on the Global Warming, Encyclopédie, and COVID-19 (once they are less slammed) articles, and I suspect I’ll come back to Village Pump with more specific requests for comment over time.
If all goes very, very well (fingers crossed), it’s possible this book could come out as Wikipedia turns twenty next year. While I will do my best to represent criticism and concerns (which is made easier by how transparent and frank Wikipedians are about the project’s challenges), I expect to show Wikipedia in a very strong light, providing context that places Wikipedia at the heart our global civilization’s attempt to preserve the best of the Enlightenment project in the face of uncertain futures. Wikipedia is already in the spotlight now because of coronavirus (here’s Wired’s article, and more recently Haaretz’s, if you haven’t seen them), and it would be really meaningful to me personally to be part of the storytelling wave I expect next year.
A little about me: I've been working in the do gooder tech space most of my career, including national-international tech policy work and with groups like IEEE, Black Girls CODE, Mozilla, and also recently The Wikimedia Foundation (a very brief writing contract). I wrote my master's thesis on the social networks of Wikipedia talk pages back in 2006, so I've been tracking the project for a while. I also find the Wikimedia universe so vast that it forces me into beginner's mind whenever I dive into it. I hope that balance of knowledge and humility makes me an interesting guide for audiences that use Wikipedia but don’t think about its inner workings much. I live in Seattle, though for now I’m spending most of my days social distancing in a cabin well outside Bellingham, Washington, USA.
Thanks for reading this far, and I look forward to learning and connecting with you over the course of this project.
Cheers,
NJ