Wikipedia edit-a-thon

robyncoombes
Feb 8, 2023
4 min read

Updated: Apr 1, 2023

Fig. 1. North and South book cover.

This morning was one of steep learning curves, from navigating Twitter for the first time (scary), to live-tweeting while editing a Wikipedia page. For this assignment, we were asked to edit a page of interest in order to update, clarify, or simply add citations. Documenting our progress with before and after screenshots, we updated Twitter on our progress in real-time and I’m sure gathered rapt followers in the process. Topics ranged wildly from ghosts to true crime, to Sherlock Holmes and Henry James. I’ve been looking into Elizabeth Gaskell and Jane Austen as potential research areas so I chose to update the former’s North and South which has a distinctly Proud and Prejudicial flavour that often goes unacknowledged.

Fig.2 Pride and Prejudice book cover.

I’ll be honest, the online landscape is not one I’m comfortable in, and more often than not, I have needed ‘encouragement’ to venture within for educational or professional reasons. In art college I ‘had to’ join Instagram to share designs, sketches and notebooks, which I still sporadically update (@robyncoombesart for those not interested) -

https://www.instagram.com/robyncoombesart/?hl=en

But while Instagram is a visual medium primarily, it’s easy to hide behind a photo of a drawing or dress you’ve made - it doesn’t require any political statement or personal declaration. You can interpret the image however you wish and largely people don’t respond beyond a simple ❤ or encouraging comment. My Twitter history on the other hand dates back to the distant hills of 7th February 2023 (and may not survive much longer). Now I enjoy (t)witticisms as much as the next person, but there’s not much comedic potential in a sub-heading of a Victorian novelist’s Wikipedia page labelled ‘Austen’s legacy’. I was cowardly enough therefore to join Twitter under the pseudonym Jane Gaskell (see what I did there), and the available handle @austensibly (quite pleased with that actually).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_and_South_(Gaskell_novel)

At the above address, my objective for the two hour edit-a-thon was simple. I began by expanding the bibliography to include these articles:

Burton, Anna. "Remarks on Forest Scenery: North and South and the 'Picturesque'."

The Gaskell Journal, vol. 32, 2018, pp. 37.

Clausson, Nils. “Romancing Manchester: Class, Gender, and the Conflicting Genres of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South.” The Gaskell Journal, vol. 21, 2007, pp. 1-20.

Felber, Lynette. “Gaskell’s Industrial Idylls: Ideology and Formal Incongruence in Mary Barton and North and South.” CLIO, vol. 1, 1988, pp. 55-72.

Linker, Laura. “Private Selves and Public Conflicts: Mastery and Gender Identity in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South.” Gender Forum, no. 51, 2015.

It was surprisingly simple to edit Wikipedia. After creating an account, all I needed to do was click edit, make my changes, and publish. While clearing up the citations, I realised the bibliography wasn’t even alphabetised (shock horror), which on reflection might speak to a downside to said ease of editing. After tweeting my ground-breaking findings, (using the #EditWikiLit), I proceeded on my pioneering work. My next mission? Change ‘Austen’s legacy’. Citing a particularly useful essay on North and South’s conflicting genres of romance and realism by Nils Clausson (see above), I included some scholarly quotes linking Gaskell’s plot and characterisation to Austen.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

UNALPHABETISED:

NEW AND IMPROVED:

I loved both of these novels growing up, which to a reductive teenager, seemed to speak of a simpler time and gentler pace of life, free from the perils and pressures of online documentation and the like. But reading them as an adult, they are of course full of the worries and dangers of their own times, whether overt or covert. Gaskell’s condition-of-England/social-problem novel is explicitly concerned with strikes, class struggles, religion, marriage, women’s roles, and the effects of industrialisation on society, environment, and human health.

Death pervades the “smoky air” of northern Milton, while the “purest fragrance” of the South’s idyllic Helstone (ch. 5) represents, according to Lynette Felber, “the pastoral utopia [that] cannot be restored as it never existed” (63). Consumed with nostalgia for her lost home, hale and hearty Margaret suffers from emotional discontent, and though outwardly intangible, both her father’s spiritual malaise and mother’s undefined but debilitating complaint, end with the same tragic fate as Bessy’s physically-evoked respiratory and industrial illness.

Fig. 3. Still from North and South, directed by Brian Percival, BBC miniseries, 2004.

Margaret Hale in the cotton 'snow' that caused many

respiratory illnesses in Manchester's cotton mills.

Fig. 4. Still from Pride and Prejudice, directed by Joe Wright, 2005.

Elizabeth Bennet in the hazy golden hour and grain particles of the idyllic rural south.

Austen published Pride and Prejudice in 1813, before the height of Victorian industrial anxiety of course, but her early draft (First Impressions) was written around the same time as Anna Seward’s “To Colebrooke Dale” at the end of the 18th century. The difference between Austen’s Derbyshire and the “black sulphurous smoke” of Seward’s poem however, is as pronounced as Gaskell’s titular divide of Milton/Helstone. Lady Catherine’s famous question: “Are the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted?” (ch. 56) speaks more to Elizabeth’s muddy petticoats and threat of social contamination, than the very real pollution happening in Sheffield to the north or Coalbrookdale to the south-west. Yet Margaret Hale and Elizabeth Bennet, like all good heroines, are strong, independent-minded, spirited and intelligent individuals, exerting what little agency, and then some, their respective ages allowed. Both hale and haughty, they transcend their geographical and social settings, reading to me at least, as sympathetic sororal protagonists across the Regency-Victorian gulf.