American novelist Philip Roth is so famous that there's a Wikipedia page about his life and numerous Wikipedia articles about individual books he's written. But by the sometimes strict editing process enforced at the collaboratively edited online encyclopedia, Roth himself was recently unable to fix what he calls a glaring error in the Wikipedia page about his novel The Human Stain.
Roth's complaint was detailed by Roth himself today in "An open letter to Wikipedia" published by The New Yorker (a sister publication of Ars). Roth tried to fix the error that his novel was "allegedly inspired by the life of the writer Anatole Broyard.” In reality, Roth explains, the book's story was inspired by an event in the life of Roth's friend, Princeton professor Melvin Tumin. Tumin was trying to track down a couple of students who had never attended class, and asked if they were "spooks." The two students were black, leading to accusations of racism against Tumin.
When Roth tried to give Wikipedia the true origins of the novel, he says he was told by a Wikipedia administrator on Aug. 26 "that I, Roth, was not a credible source."
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