Despite Wikipedia’s massive size, its editors are often most comfortable with the small and the insignificant. This attention to detail is what makes Wikipedia so comprehensive. Surveying the site, the journalist Eve Fairbanks observed, “Often, it’s the most arcane distinctions… that provoke the bitterest tugs-of-war.” Indeed, on Wikipedia, seemingly minor details sometimes draw the most vociferous debate. The “Caesar salad” entry, for example, has seen regular skirmishes about the presence or absence of anchovies in the dressing. On another front, one of the site’s most prolific editors has made thousands of revisions, almost all of them correcting perceived misusages of the phrase “comprised of” across the site’s millions of articles. Far from being treated as an eccentric outlier, this editor is celebrated, recognized as an exemplary WikiGnome, a class of editors committed to “tying up little loose ends and making things run more smoothly.”

A tone of bemusement often textures journalistic accounts of such efforts. The activities of Wikipedians invite attention in part because they reveal just how much passion seemingly trivial matters can elicit. (Paradoxically, the desire to be taken seriously may drive these debates. Only when Wikipedia gets every detail right, the premise goes, will it be accorded respect.) Warning new editors against deleting material unnecessarily, the site’s guidelines delineate a principle of caution: “An encyclopedia is a collection of facts… Therefore, consider each fact provided as potentially precious.” That the encyclopedia’s conflicts often elicit mockery is both its curse and the consequence of its editors’ care.

Even with regard to the pettiest editorial imperatives, the fight against in-universe perspective is marginal. It goes unmentioned in the site’s main style guide, broached only in a subsection titled “Writing about fiction.” Buried as it is, the demand to avoid in-universe perspective is seemingly taken for granted by Wikipedia’s core editors. One rarely catches them arguing over it on the talk pages of even the most contentious entries. If Wikipedia is at war and its editors are soldiers, excising in-universe perspective is like cleaning the bathrooms, a messy task that makes the barracks more livable at the expense of one’s dignity. Nonetheless, this small struggle over verb tense—the way we literally tell time—has everything to do with the site’s desire for legitimacy.

When I teach writing, I stress the immediacy of art to my students. Fiction, I tell them, plays out in the perpetual present, a story making itself anew each time we read or tell it. When we write about a work in the present tense, we focus on what it does, on the ways that it whispers and shouts as we listen to it. With the present tense, we acknowledge that the work is a thing in itself, a subject in the grammatical sense: It is one that acts, albeit one impelled to action by its encounter with the reader. In the process, we maintain the conceit that art has a degree of independent and objective reality, and that, therefore, it can be examined, argued about, and discussed.