The Connection Between Rival “Factpedias” and Print
By Stephen Harrison
October 11, 2026
I have been taking a short sabbatical from covering Wikipedia as a journalist, but I did want to take the opportunity to boost this short story “Sunshine Hills Reality Edit” by fiction author Tina Connolly and recently published by Future Tense Fiction. The premise is that America has split into several autonomous regions, each with their rival Factpedia. “Groups began branching Factpedia to support and solidify their own Reality Edit,” the protagonist says. “And now you can turn to the appropriate set of Factpedias (among thousands) to support whatever Reality Edit floats your boat and proves all your opinions to be positively, inarguably correct.” Although you may suspect the story to focus on digital knowledge and edit wars, the characters ultimately place great importance on the role of physical books. The narrator observes that “every time you return to that printed page, the words will remain the same.” The quality of typographical fixity is extremely valuable in this fictional world (as in ours).
Connolly’s short story pairs beautifully with a response essay from Monika Sengul-Jones, a writer and researcher who happens to also be a long-term Wikipedia editor. She notes that facts exist in relationship to one another and to the people who curate them. “As artificial intelligence systems break the link between information and informer, we’re forced to grapple with how to seek answers in an ecosystem devoid of context,” Sengul-Jones writes. Ultimately, both Connolly and Sengul-Jones suggest that the “answer” is to treat knowledge as an outcome of human relations and dispel the lie that knowledge can be generated by the neutral vessel of technology.