IN APRIL 2013 Amanda Filipacchi, an American writer, discovered that the editors of Wikipedia, a crowdsourced online encyclopaedia, were re-categorising female American authors from "American Novelists" to to "American Women Novelists". No corresponding "American Men Novelists" subject area existed at that time. The process seemingly happened sub rosa, through the actions of several editors. After she published an article in the New York Times pointing this out, Ms Filipacchi found that her own Wikipedia entry was edited numerous times for spurious and sometimes vindictive reasons. "Wikipedia is created and edited by its users," she observed. But when it comes to recategorising novelists, or vetting changes to individual pages, who actually makes the decisions?
