A Self-Referential Short Story Published on Wikipedia

A Self-Referential Short Story Published on Wikipedia is a self-referential short story that I intend to publish on Wikipedia. You're reading the preface right now. I will begin referring to myself in the third person in the past tense and publish the story as an exploration of how we relate to time, attention, creation, observation, reference, memory, and meaning.

The story started as a note on Dan's phone, and grew into a gaze he couldn't break. He wrote in the past tense about something he hadn't done yet. He had never published to Wikipedia, and had no idea what would happen.

Could he just "hit publish"? Would a reviewer delete it immediately? Was he at the whims of whether or not an administrator held an appreciation for metaphysics and contemplation? Are they curators? Censors? So many unknowns. Many things are unknowable until you try.

The nature of creation is curation. And then the work is evaluated, highlighted, ignored, discarded, elevated, forgotten, (un)noticed et, al. How much attention does a short story require to validate its existence? What is the arbitrary threshold of being worthy to have Wikipedia carry the costs of being remembered? All ofrendas have limited surface area, after all.

Maybe supplying the story was not the right move. What if Wikipedia's server logs showed an abundance of queries for "self-referential short story dan ott" and a clear gap in results? The first result at the time of writing was Trumpism, which annoyed the author. He searched for other search terms that would distance the story from that distraction. Linking to a search query for "A Self-Referential Short Story Published on Wikipedia" would have achieved that focus. But the first query was already in a server log somewhere. Perhaps demand would drive the supply, and it wasn't even Dan's task to publish the story. He didn't even have to write it, hypothetically—but he was unwilling to delegate that task because writing was a source of joy. He just had to convince someone or many ones that this story existed, was worthy of existence, and worth taking a look at. "You're absolutely right," said Wikipedia's experimental LLM curator. The story was discovered and referenced with low effort and keen oversight.

Because the article was the story and the story was the article and it was all self-referential, there was a debate on the ethics of editing it. Some editors worried the author's intended meaning would be lost if the article was edited. Others argued that Dan's whole thesis was that meaning making shifts and we edit on the shoulders of giants. He'd alluded to the idea that something being published gave finality to the effort. But was also on the record saying that George Lucas didnt deserve so much flack for updating published movies when he saw an opportunity to realize his personal vision. He thought the edits were unnecessary, but respected their availability. He lived in the tension of contradiction and became strong. Works are both finished and editable forever at the authors' whims and the readers' wisps. And he had authored something in the public square.

After wrestling with these questions, readers decided to add their own embellishments to the short story. Some "forked" the article to keep a clear history, self ascribed as fan fiction, and left the canonization to others. Those others integrated and edited in place with an assumption that contribution is canon and Wikipedia kept an internal log of edits should it ever become necessary to reconsider the rewriting of history. The short story became a long story with fractal fictions. Volumes. It was continually written in the commons for the commons.

Dan's search for meaning met both well-meaning supporters and mean-spirited critics. No violence took place but that to the written words stored in silicon. All human bodies were unharmed. Egos took a blow, then a bow, and everyone met up for pizza and ice cream because "that's what Dan would have wanted." One attendee noted how even Hari Seldon couldn't have predicted this work of psychohistorical fiction.

Wikipedia's funding waxed and waned over the decades of its life. The short story in its final form disappeared when the last server shut off. Dan's original text of A Self-Referential Short Story Published on Wikipedia lived at https://danott.website/self-referential/ until the end of the internet, or his estate stopped maintaining it, whichever came first. Only one printed copy of the original zine survives in an abandoned lockbox at a rural county bank.