An Open Letter to Wikipedia (2012)

I’m dying to know, were they able to use this New Yorker article as a secondary source and fix the Wikipedia entry?

It appears so:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Stain

>Roth described in a 2012 piece for The New Yorker how his novel was inspired by an event in the life of his friend Melvin Tumin, a "professor of sociology at Princeton for some thirty years". Tumin was subject to a "witch hunt" but was ultimately found blameless in a matter involving use of allegedly racial language concerning two African American students.

...

>In the reviews of the book in both the daily and the Sunday New York Times in 2000, Kakutani and Lorrie Moore suggested that the central character of Coleman Silk might have been inspired by Anatole Broyard, a well-known New York literary editor of the Times. Other writers in the academic and mainstream press made the same suggestion. After Broyard's death in 1990, it had been revealed that he racially passed during his many years employed as a critic at The New York Times. He was of Louisiana Creole ancestry. However, Roth himself has stated that he had not known of Broyard's ancestry when he started writing the book and only learned of it months later.

I wonder if a blog entry by Roth would have sufficed as a secondary source. It probably would have. They need something to point to after all. It can't just anecdotally be noted that a wikipedia editor received an email from the author.

One solution could be to give people forums on Wikipedia to state their perspectives, which would then become source material for articles. Assuming there is some way to verify their identities, this could be a way for famous people to participate in their wikipedia entries without editing the entries themselves.

>It can't just anecdotally be noted that a wikipedia editor received an email from the author.

For a work of fiction, it absolutely should. Who knows more about a character in a fictional story than the person who made up the character?

Should we purge everything from the record that Douglas Adams ever said about Arthur Dent?

If Wikipedia was around in the 1500's, the entry on Shakespeare would be almost entirely based on the published criticism of Christopher Marlowe, and not on what Shakespeare, himself, said about his works. And the world would be much poorer for it.