My story
After completing my BA in philosophy and political science, I started my MA at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas (Tel Aviv University). But as this case with many social science and humanities students - I had no funding and had to find work. Being from New York and being a native English speaker, I began working as a translator and editor at the English-language website of a popular news website. I fell in love with the newsroom and ended up getting addicted to news. Fast forward seven years - I still have not finished my MA, but now have a successful career as a journalist in Israel. I now no longer work for the news site, but for Haaretz - Israel's most prestigious newspaper - where I held a number of senior editorial roles, including heading their original English-language news team as assignments editor.
However, I still had my academic interests and still had to finish my MA. My focus was Wikipedia. I was always interested in the history and politics of knowledge and Wikipedia seemed to be a perfect arena for trying to understand what forces were informing knowledge online. My thesis was about placing Wikipedia's within the history of encyclopaedias. I've always loved encyclopaedias, relics of systems of thought now gone from this world, they seemed to me to be key artifacts within the history of human thought, documenting not just the facts of yesteryear, but intellectual history as such.
While working as an editor, I started to try and merge the two. As Haaretz is a unique newspaper I had the amazing opportunity to develop what I call Wikipedia journalism - the attempt to cover Wikipedia and the social process of fact-making in much the same way newspaper cover political processes like legislation or even crime. My first story was about how the Wikipedia article for the font Calibiri become a political battleground that held the fate of the Pakistani government its sway. The idea the knowledge and facts are politics is very common in academic circles - particularly those well versed in critical theory. However, at the time, this seemed niche, and very academic. All that changed when Donald Trump was elected and then overnight my esoteric academic and journalistic interest moved center stage and I was on the ground floor of what we would now call "disinformation" journalism. I was suddenly getting front page stories - for example my investigation into the biggest hoax in Wikipedia's history - and was even given a weekly spot on Israeli television, where I reported about Wikipedia in Hebrew. It was at this time that I also started writing about Wikipedia for WIRED UK, the British version of the famed tech magazine, reporting on how politics in India and between China and Hong Kong have played out on the open encyclopaedias. It was also on WIRED UK where I was among the first to flag the issue of COVID-19 disinformation online, just a month into the pandemic (a fact I know because Wikipedia credits me as such).
At this stage, I had still not finished my MA - now entering its 8th year! However, I had not abandoned academic research. Together with Rona Aviram, a close friend who grew up with me in Tel Aviv - a biologist from the Weizmann Institute of Science - we began researching Wikipedia and its ties to science. As "fake news" was the hot buzz word, and as no one was actually reading academic publications, it seemed lucrative to study how scientific research was represented on Wikipedia. The result of our initial work was a study into the history of circadian clock research on Wikipedia, published in the clock field's main journal.
Rona Aviram has since become Dr. Rona Aviram and today she and me are short-term research fellows at the CRI researching how Wikipedia documents the growth of science and can map the diffusion of academic knowledge over time through a case study on CRISPR. Our most recent study (together with Dr. Jonathan Sobel) is about Wikipedia and COVID-19 (preprint).
In the years that have since passed, I have continued to mesh journalism and academic research - even writing a history of Wikipedia's ties with the media, published as a chapter in MIT Press' Wikipedia @ 20 anthology. Making sure journalists cover Wikipedia better is a topic I am still interested in and I have written about it for the Columbia Journalism Review and even The Signpost - Wikipedia's community run newspaper.
I am proud to be one of only a handful of Wikipedia journalists and though I have branched out to other types of journalism (for example participating in the global Project Pegasus investigation into misuse of Israeli spyware led by the Paris-based NGO Forbidden Stories), I still feel Wikipedia is an endlessly rich and important arena that needs more researchers and intellectuals to study it.
Oh... I have even finished by MA thesis last year.