The newsroom is a crime scene. Blood on the keyboard, coffee gone cold, and a deadline that passed twenty minutes ago. We’ve always said journalism is the first draft of history. It’s a romantic sentiment, usually deployed to excuse the fact that we got the middle initial of a senator wrong or missed a crucial detail because a PR flack stopped answering their iPhone. It’s fast. It’s messy. It’s a snapshot of a building on fire, taken while the photographer is still trying to dodge the falling beams.

But if journalism is the first draft, Wikipedia has become the second. And frankly, the second draft is the one that actually sticks.

Walk into any bar and settle a bet. You don’t pull up a three-thousand-word long-form piece from The Atlantic to see who won the 1994 World Series or whether a certain tech mogul actually founded the company he claims to have built. You go to the gray-and-white site with the globe puzzle. You look for the [edit] tag.

There’s a specific kind of friction here that nobody wants to talk about. Journalism is a business of egos and bylines. Wikipedia is a collective hive mind of pedants. It’s an army of unpaid volunteers—mostly guys in cargo shorts with an obsessive interest in train schedules or mid-century geopolitics—who spend their Tuesday nights litigating whether a comma in the third paragraph of a "Controversies" section constitutes a "Neutral Point of View."

It’s a bizarre symbiotic relationship, but it’s becoming increasingly parasitic. Wikipedia needs us to do the dirty work. They don't send reporters to the front lines of a war or to sit through a grueling four-hour city council meeting about sewage runoff. They wait. They sit in their ergonomic chairs, wait for the New York Times or The Guardian to publish the report, and then they synthesize it. They strip away the prose, the flair, and the "voice," leaving behind a skeleton of facts.

But here’s the rub: journalism is broke. The first draft is getting thinner. Local papers are being gutted by private equity firms that treat newsrooms like old strip malls to be sold for parts. When a local paper dies, the first draft of that town’s history simply stops being written. You can’t have a second draft if there isn't a first. Wikipedia’s "Reliable Sources" list is getting shorter because the outlets they rely on are vanishing behind paywalls or just vanishing entirely.

Take a look at the "edit wars" over something like the 2022 Twitter acquisition. It wasn't just a fight over facts; it was a fight over reality. One side cites a leak from a disgruntled engineer; the other cites a corporate press release. The Wikipedia editors have to decide which "first draft" holds water. They are the high priests of the modern era, deciding what becomes permanent record and what gets relegated to the "talk" page graveyard.

And they do it for free. That’s the most insulting part for those of us still trying to make a living behind a keyboard. A subscription to a major daily will run you $15 a month, but Wikipedia just asks for the price of a latte once a year to keep the servers humming. We’re charging for the raw materials, and they’re giving away the finished product.

It’s a strange way to run a civilization. We’ve outsourced our collective memory to a nonprofit foundation and a bunch of anonymous users with usernames like HistoryBuff99. We trust the "second draft" more than the first because it feels more stable. It doesn't have a face. It doesn't have a political slant—or at least, it pretends it doesn't by burying the bias under a mountain of citations.

The danger, of course, is what happens when the first draft becomes a hallucination. As AI starts scraping both journalism and Wikipedia to create a "third draft" for search engine snippets, the errors don't just get corrected—they get baked in. We’re moving toward a world where the truth isn't what happened, but what the most persistent editor decided happened.

History used to be written by the victors. Now, it’s written by whoever has the most time to spend on a Saturday night arguing about the "References" section.

If the first draft is a scream in the dark, the second draft is the silence that follows. It's neater. It's more organized. It's much easier to digest. It just happens to be built on the bones of an industry that’s currently checking its pockets for spare change.

We’re all waiting to see what the third draft looks like. My guess? It won't have any human fingerprints on it at all.