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03
Nov 2024
'It's an obsession': Harrogate's Wikipedia creator on why she loves secrets and scandal
We’ve all read stories about tech entrepreneurs – people who got in on the digital action early and reaped the rewards. Well, Harrogate woman Linda O’Carroll is not one of those – but she is a pioneer of sorts.
She did actually get in on the digital action early, but as a volunteer content creator rather than a dealmaker, so any rewards she has reaped are certainly not financial.
Linda, who lives in Burn Bridge, is one of a global army of Wikipedians – people who write articles for Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia and world’s fourth-most visited website. They are self-appointed and unpaid, kept in check only by an even larger army of unpaid, self-appointed quality controllers in the form of experts – both genuine and armchair – proofreaders and general nitpickers.
She told the Stray Ferret:
Wikipedia is extremely strict. You’ve got to get things right, or people will pick up on it and soon let you know.
I’ve opted to have all my work peer-reviewed, so every fact has to be backed by a citation. It’s professional-standard.
Linda has been creating Wikipedia articles for over 20 years – she started just three years after Wikipedia was founded in 2001 – and has written and contributed to hundreds of entries, and uploaded more than 29,000 images.
Originally trained as a teacher, Linda is also an advanced scuba diving instructor, a qualified silversmith, and a top-level knitting pattern designer (“there aren’t many of us about,” she says).
For the time being, though, it is Wikipedia that occupies nearly all her waking hours. She said:
I do this for 12 hours a day, seven days a week. It’s an obsession – but that’s what happens when you really get into it.
Taxidermists and acrobats
As her other hobbies demonstrate, Linda has eclectic interests, and that’s reflected in her work. She’s written articles on Soviet singers, Roman museums, priests, murderers, taxidermists, acrobats and eco-warriors.
She said:
I’ll write about anything that takes my fancy. I don’t know anything about engineering, for example, but for some reason I’ve done quite a lot of articles about that sort of thing – sewers, gas lighting, and reinforced concrete.
My father was an architect, and although he spoke over the tops of our heads a lot of the time, I learned a lot, so I’ve written quite a lot of articles about architecture. It’s surprising how it happens, really.
It’s also striking that the long list of articles she has written contains nothing of knitting, silversmithing or scuba diving. She said:
I wouldn’t touch diving – that's a thing you do, rather than a thing you’d write about.
Local interest
Many of her Wikipedia articles are about people and places connected with Harrogate. So, if you ever want to read about Harlow Hill Cemetery, Harrogate’s war memorial, Hackfall Wood, or Bishop Monkton ings, Linda’s Wiki pages may well be your first port of call.
The same goes for local Victorian luminaries such as developer Richard Ellis, newspaperman Robert Ackrill and toffee-maker John Farrah.
I like writing about the 19th century because you can’t get into trouble. No-one's still alive, the images are all out of copyright, and there’s just so much to go at!
I love scandal, and looking at the ways people reacted at the time, which often weren’t as we would now. A good Wikipedia page for me is one with secrets, which I can winkle out and not get into trouble for!
She’s made quite a few connections between the good and the great of Victorian Harrogate, which suggest something rather more than platonic affection. But for lack of a ‘smoking gun’ – a citable reference – she refrains from publishing.
But even though “trouble” is unlikely when writing about historical figures, Linda is still sensitive to their memory. She has written about two well-known historical misers, John Turner of Harrogate and Margery Jackson of Carlisle, but has avoided echoing the prejudices of their times.
She said:
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, misers were often demonised and described as being ‘glinty-eyed’ or ‘long-fingered’. But I think they probably had mental or medical conditions, so I’m very careful about how I write about them.
Fellow Wikipedian Lucy Moore attracted attention a couple of years ago for her efforts to improve the coverage of women on Wikipedia, writing more than 500 female biographies for the site.
Linda’s approach is slightly different. She said:
One group that interests me is criminal women. A lot of writers aren’t interested in them – they prefer women achievers – but I find them fascinating. I’ve only done two so far, including the Sheffield poisoner Kate Dover, but I want to do more.
The deleters
For someone with high editorial and stylistic standards, there may be a chance that other, less meticulous contributors could annoy her with lower standards, so does she have any bugbears?
She said:
Not really. People contribute from every walk of life. Some haven’t got the best education, but they do all have enthusiasm, and we all do our best.
One group of people who do annoy me is the ones called ‘deleters’, who will delete whole pages, or collections of images. There’s a huge number of them, and they appear to do it out of malice. I’ve heard some even keep a tally of how many articles and photos they’ve deleted.
You do need people with deleting powers, because some people will create inappropriate entries of the 'readers' wives’ kind, or silly pages about their next-door neighbour Brian, aged 8. But deleters are just awful.
Proudest achievement
As for which entry she’s most proud of, she doesn’t hesitate:
Catherine Mawer. I did a set of six to eight articles on the Mawer Group, which was a group of architectural sculptors who did a lot of the buildings around Leeds, including the Town Hall and Starbucks.
Catherine [who was born in Bilton] owned the company – which was very rare in Victorian society – but no-one realised she was actually one of the sculptors. I did a lot of research and worked out that she must have been, and that she was absolutely brilliant.
I’m very proud that my research brought her out of complete obscurity, to the point where there’s now a blue plaque to her on Starbucks in Leeds.
As for why she devotes so much time to a largely thankless and totally unpaid task that has no end in sight, she said:
I’m a great believer that the work you do shouldn’t just be valued in terms of what you get paid. And I enjoy it. I do prefer the digging, but I also quite like seeing the finished article once I’ve written it.
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