Wikipedian-in-Residence: Rachel Helps

Glen Nelson: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Center’s Studio Podcast. I'm your host, Glen Nelson. I thank you for listening. Recently, I've been looking back over our seven years of monthly interviews, and I'm surprised how timeless many of them feel. The Center is in the process of creating transcriptions of our podcasts—some people are readers more than listeners—and we're finding some interesting ways to enliven the printed interviews with occasional video and audio embedded material, highlighted texts, pull quotes, and images. Take a look at our website for more. Today, I'm happy to introduce our listeners to Rachel Helps. Her name might be new to you, but her writing probably isn't, although a byline doesn't appear on most of her work. Are you intrigued? Confused? Let's dive in. Hello, Rachel. It's great to meet you. I'm excited to learn about your work.

Rachel Helps: Hi, Glen. Thanks for having me.

Glen Nelson: Your job title is Wikipedian-in-Residence at the BYU Library. That's the Harold B. Lee Library. What is a Wikipedian?

Rachel Helps: A Wikipedian-in-Residence is an information professional who helps institutions and groups of people to contribute to Wikimedia projects. They're also called Wikimedians-in-Residence, and they often help archives and museums to upload and share their collections on Wikimedia projects. For example, The Met has had a Wikipedian-in-Residence and a Wikimedian at large. They've uploaded a bunch of their public domain works to Wikimedia Commons, where Wikipedias in many languages can use them to enrich their encyclopedia articles. I've done some image uploads, and my team also uses books in our library's significant holdings to create and improve pages on Wikipedia in English. 

Glen Nelson: OK, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Rachel Helps: OK. I've long been a student of human nature and the arts. I'm like, how far back do you want me to go? Well, I majored in psychology and then I completed coursework for an MA in English, but I dropped out before I finished my thesis. I've always been interested in experimental literature, so I didn't lose my interest in experimental literature when I dropped out. I worked as a freelancer doing book reviews, and I was also an intern at this hipster video game magazine called The Kill Screen. Oh, they're based in New York, so maybe your listeners will know about it. Then I wrote two visual novels with my sister and sister-in-law. They're called Our Personal Space and Space to Grow. In the first, you’re a newlywed helping to colonize a new planet. Your choices affect the future of your relationship in the colony. And in the sequel, you're helping the colony to navigate its relationship with other people on the planet and raising your child from infancy to adulthood. So some of my research on early Mormon history in Utah kind of affected your conflicts with the miners on this planet. The settler situation is really similar, even in a science fiction-y context. But for my position here at the library, I had a friend in cataloging. She's still my friend. Her name's Kjerste, and she suggested I apply for this Wikipedian position. And I've been working there since 2016. While I've been working, I've written two interactive fiction pieces. One is “Skillick's Bride,” a work of Mormon feminist horror, which was an AML finalist for short fiction. The other is “Admiration Point,” where you play as a texture artist for a virtual gallery in the near future who has an unwanted crush on a co-worker. That one won 20th place in the annual Interactive Fiction Competition. I've also been a member of the board for the Association for Mormon Letters [AML] since 2020, and I started our Discord server trying to kickstart the community that AML used to have with their email list. Last year, I restarted my master's program in English Literature at BYU, and I've published two articles on the early literary curriculum in the Relief Society and Mutual Improvement Associations with Michael Austin. And my article on the history of the Mormon Esperanto Society will be coming out in the next issue of the Journal of Mormon History. I'm also– I'm sorry, there's just too many things I'm doing right now. I'm also working on a book on Alice Louise Reynolds' work with two of my library colleagues. And my thesis for my master's will be on speculative theology in Mormon literature before 1940. And Chris Blythe is my thesis chair. Going back to the Wikipedia work, our team received the Ardis E. Parshall Public History Award from the Mormon History Association for our work on Mormon Studies pages. And personally, I plan to apply to PhD programs after I graduate.

Glen Nelson: You are a busy person. If somebody wants to read more about your work and all of these publications and your creative work, where would they go?

Rachel Helps: I've been trying to hustle my Mormon influencer game on Facebook and Instagram. You can look up my name on Facebook, or I'm @helpsful.reviews on Instagram. I still need to put together an official website, but that's a good place to find my stuff. My interactive fiction stuff is on itch.io. It's rwelean.itch.io. But I know we wanted to talk about the Wikipedia stuff. I have a lot of stuff to say about that too.

Glen Nelson: Well, it's so interesting to hear you talk because they all do connect.

Rachel Helps: Right.

Glen Nelson: I think that's exciting, as a background, to talk about Wikipedia now a little bit more. Where are you from originally?

Rachel Helps: I grew up in the East Bay Area, kind of by Berkeley, Oakland. It's this little town called El Sobrante, and the name means “the leftovers” in Spanish.

Glen Nelson: Did you take that personally at all? 

Rachel Helps: Oh, we would tell people about that with pride. We were from the leftovers, yeah. El Sob!

Glen Nelson: In preparation for this interview, Rachel, I've been thinking about a bigger question. How do we know something? What is knowledge and how is it passed on? In my day in school, knowledge revolved around publishing, like textbooks for example, and a published book was equated to truth. So I went to books to learn, and my teachers taught from books that they had read. But today, knowledge has migrated to include digital knowledge, something democratized into data that anybody can create and put out there, which can be as messy, I guess, as democracy itself. So do you think about these things when you're writing and researching, about the standard for establishing knowledge?

Rachel Helps: Oh, definitely. Reliable sources are really important on Wikipedia, right? Because the quality of your information depends on the quality of your sources. A lot of Wikipedia pages actually have a problem where they don't really cite reliable sources. They just kind of cite whatever the person could find online about it. Sometimes it's good stuff, and sometimes it's just someone's little page that they made. Something we can do here in the library is we have access to the published sources or the journal articles. When we summarize those articles and put them on Wikipedia, we're helping to democratize that information, like you said. But we're taking it from reliable sources. When we cite our sources, that can also provide breadcrumbs for people using Wikipedia for research.

Glen Nelson: The scale of Wikipedia is so vast, you know. This is an exaggeration, but it feels sometimes like the expectation is that it's a sum total of all things known, or at least you can look up something that will get you to something else. If I don't know something, I rarely go to a printed book first. Now it's a search engine determining which related things I might want to know, and Wikipedia is often at the top of that search list. So what are your thoughts on that? Tell me what kind of responsibility you feel for that. It must be a little bit of pressure.

Rachel Helps: Actually, a lot of the Wikipedia pages we work on are so bad that we're not so worried that we're just going to ruin everything because it's like, oh, this page finally has some inline citations, instead of just randomly saying stuff or, oh, we took out all this misinformation from this page. We've definitely improved it. Sometimes I do worry. I'm like, if I don't choose the right sources to summarize, then people aren't going to get a neutral point of view on this topic. So I feel like I'm pretty scrupulous about trying to find the most neutral sources. But you know, everyone has bias. So yeah, I don't know. Maybe I'm ruining Wikipedia and I've tainted everything!

Glen Nelson: No, I doubt that you are. But you're referring to articles that are existing, and you and your team are going in and giving new sources, editing things, making things more correct and so on, right?

Rachel Helps: Yeah. And when we create new pages, they do have to pass notability criteria that Wikipedia lines out. The subject needs to be mentioned in multiple sources that are independent of the subject, and it needs to be a significant mention. For example, I created a page for Hildebrando de Melo after he had an exhibit here, and he was definitely notable. It was fairly easy to make a page for him, but I did end up citing some “about this artist” kind of things rather than academic articles about him, because he's a new, living artist. It's sometimes harder to find sources like that. 

Glen Nelson: Yeah, I'm sure it is. Another aspect of knowledge is the question of how somebody finds it in the first place, including the barriers to what can be learned; like, searchability is this gateway and who has access to that. And then because of your situation at BYU, this includes documenting affiliation and membership with The Church, I imagine. I'd love to hear some thoughts on that in a second. Some wiki editor writing my wiki page, for example, noted that I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is true, and it also makes it a globally available and known truth. So what are your thoughts on that?

Rachel Helps: So religious identity is one of those things, along with like sexual identity or race, that as Wikipedia editors, we want to be careful to source to a reliable source. For living people, if they make a statement about their identity, we can use that as a source. Of course, it could change over time, right? Sometimes the Wikipedia pages are kind of stuck in the past about it, because we'd rather be conservative. I'm trying to think of this example. I'm like, is this going to out someone? But I'll just speak in generalities because I can't remember exactly who it was. But there's an LDS author that we worked on her page and we improved it, and she since sort of distanced herself from The Church. But we couldn't really say that until she had said it in an interview that we could cite. You know, some people are like, oh, I know this person in real life and this is what she told me. I'm like, well, that's saying it prematurely. Or like another author who got divorced, and someone was like, oh, let's cite this Instagram post where she's a newly single mom. I'm like, nope, that is not enough to say this person is divorced. So it can be frustrating to people who are used to getting information right away. But there is something about Wikipedia; Wikipedia is not breaking news. We want to wait until we know what the information is before we put it on. But if someone identifies as LDS and I'm working on their page, I'm going to include that as long as it's mentioned somewhere that we can cite.

Glen Nelson: Yeah, I've noticed in many wiki articles,  the section about somebody's personal life including their religious belief or upbringing, not just LDS people, but this is just a super common thing throughout. That's where your work overlaps with what the Center is doing. 

Rachel Helps: Are you guys trying to identify people?

Glen Nelson: Well I mean, our work is to advocate for LDS artists. So we have databases of thousands of artists.

Rachel Helps: I just have a question about that. What happens if they leave The Church? Do you say “disaffected”, or how do you document that?

Glen Nelson: Yeah, we don't. Our thought has been and is to be super inclusive. We're not going to reach out to everybody and, you know, query them on the last time they went to church or whatever. But I really care about this topic of including all these artists, because sometimes artists who are no longer participating in The Church, when I look at their new art, references to their beliefs and Mormonism in particular are still there. So who am I to say that that's not the case, right? Just like you were saying that you err on the side of something being documented and quotable, I err on the side of the broader picture. So if someone self-identifies in some way as being connected to The Church, that's all I need, but I'm not going to really push it. If I got the feeling that somebody was super uncomfortable with something and we were publishing something or including artists in an exhibition or a book or whatever, we would reach out, you know, to the artist. 

Rachel Helps: Yeah, and talk about it. That's a good idea. I know, for example, Vardis Fisher, his widow was like, “he was not Mormon, stop calling him Mormon.” But then it’s interesting because there's lots of other sources that are like, Vardis Fisher has scars from his religious affiliation and growing up in this culture in Idaho. Since he's dead, it's sort of easier to talk about his religious identity because it's not as personal to him. He can't complain about it.

Glen Nelson: Yeah, I mean, I get that. I want to be respectful. I guess one of the things that that strikes me about this conversation, this part of our conversation, is that in articles on Wikipedia, which is kind of a proxy for lots of stuff that's available online, it's just really, really common to find out about people's religious identity and orientation and politics and so on. And years ago, that would just not be part of the dialogue.

Rachel Helps: Oh, interesting. Yeah, maybe it's because you know Wikipedia is mostly volunteers. And sometimes volunteers can kind of be fans of someone and they want to know more about their personal life. There's kind of a joke, right? You go to someone's Wikipedia page and you immediately scroll down to see what the personal life section is. So you can see all the drama in their life, or something like, “this person was divorced,” or like, “oh, they had five kids, but two of them were stepchildren and they adopted them,” or whatever. For whatever reason, people are most interested in personal views. 

Glen Nelson: Well, people are sharing and oversharing too. So let me ask you, kind of stepping back a little bit, how long have you been doing this work?

Rachel Helps: I started in 2016. So it's been eight and a half years. There's no degree in Wikipedia studies. When I started, I had created a page for one of my classes before, but I did not have a lot of experience with Wikipedia. So I had to sort of learn that all on my own. Growing up as a millennial, learning things on your own was just part of our culture, right? Like, oh, you want a website? Well, look up how to do the HTML. Wiki markup is really similar to HTML, so that part wasn't that difficult. Although one of the problems on Wikipedia is that all the documentation is also written by volunteers, so it can kind of be uneven. Learning how to edit Wikipedia can be kind of daunting at first, because it's hard to know where to start. But since I started working as a Wikipedian-in-Residence, there have been a lot more training materials made available. For example, Wiki EDU has modules for undergraduates and graduate students who are working on Wikipedia pages for their classes. It goes through the Wikipedia philosophy and how to create your user page and edit in your sandbox a lot more methodically than if you just log into Wikipedia for the first time. 

Glen Nelson: Well, I had never heard of this job, Wikipedians-in-Residence. So I looked it up on Wikipedia, of course, and it talks about training and purpose and conflicts of interest and compensation. One thing I noticed was that often they're connected to libraries and universities. And sometimes the duration of that is really short. The residency essentially is really short. With you, you're not doing this just as a volunteer, right? Like this is a job. So does the university give you a mandate of any kind, or guidance of what it is that you're supposed to do and who to write about?

Rachel Helps: That's a great question, too. One of my colleagues, Lane Rasberry, recently gave an interview about his experience as a Wikimedian-in-Residence, and he said, no one tells me what to do, but I'm paid by the institution I work for. But it's kind of like if you had an artist in residence, you wouldn't be like, oh, we need a poem about one of our founders; can you write that for us? That would be like, OK, that's weird. So I like that take, and I think I'm going with it. But basically, people can suggest things for me to work on. In the past, curators in our special collections have sometimes requested that I work on people whose archives we have, sometimes people whose papers they're in the middle of getting. I'm not sure how much more I want to do of that in the future because it's led to some of the possible issues of conflict of interest where it's like, oh, this person I know is donating their papers to BYU and the curators want me to create a page for this person. My team needs to take a step back from conflict of interest editing and be more careful about disclosing it. A conflict of interest on Wikipedia is a little different than in other places because any relationship can be a potential conflict of interest. If you write about a subject you have a relationship with, you should disclose that relationship on the page's talk page. If you're being paid to edit a page, other editors have this heightened sense of danger of there being a possible conflict of interest in your editing. In reality, you can have a potential conflict of interest very easily, whether you are paid or unpaid. Most Wikipedia editors have relationships with the subject they write about. Even if it is a fan relationship, why else would they spend their valuable time researching and writing about it, right? In my opinion, if you're evaluating someone else's Wikipedia writing, their writing is more important than their identity or whether or not they're being paid. So it's more important to me that they write neutrally and cite reliable sources than that they be completely removed from the subject.

Glen Nelson: You know, even 10 years ago, when I would write books and have some kind of citation of Wikipedia, I got pushback from publishers about it. But that's changed now. I just submitted something for publication and they didn't even blink at the wiki citations. That feels legitimizing to me. Does that feel the same way to you?

Rachel Helps: I don't mean to criticize your work, Glen, but I think it's irresponsible to cite Wikipedia in any scholarly work unless you're discussing the Wikipedia page itself. The reliability of Wikipedia's information is extremely uneven, so you should always go back to the original source and check it. And if it works, just use that source. But I know you're not the only one. I have seen many scholars cite Wikipedia.

Glen Nelson: So then how do you think of Wikipedia as a purpose? What is its purpose then?

Rachel Helps: It's a bridge. It bridges readers to sources that might not otherwise come up in search results. Or sometimes you don't want to spend five hours reading several different articles about a subject, and if a Wikipedia page can summarize that information it makes it way more accessible. For example, I don't know how familiar you are with the Open Access movement, but it's this movement to try to get more journals to make their articles freely available online. Nowadays lots of institutions have repositories where you can freely read all of the theses and dissertations from their graduate students. And that is wonderful. I am 100% for that. However, this information is still locked away in these sources. So, I call it information broadcasting, when you take information that's already online, but you make it available on a platform that has a bigger audience and in a way that's more accessible or easier to understand. That's an important part of the work of anyone editing Wikipedia, is to put in those twenty hours of reading the related articles and summarize it so someone can be up to date in five or six minutes.

Glen Nelson: Listeners to this podcast that's focused on interviews with artists might wonder how you fit into it, but I see your work as being crucial to the advocacy for LDS artists, because if somebody wants to know a little bit about an artist or read about their affiliation to The Church or whatever, that's significant and they can find that. Do you feel that your work has that component of advocacy to it?

Rachel Helps: OK, advocacy is like a trigger word. Because of some recent accusations that my team's editing is not neutral, I am very hesitant to use the term advocate, but I will advocate for open knowledge. I will say that my work on Wikipedia aligns with my scholarly interest in making information about Mormon authors and artists more accessible. 

Glen Nelson: I've noticed, just because I have a Wikipedia page, I've noticed that it has allowed other people to look me up and to contact me. I don't have a website, because a lot of my stuff is ghostwriting, for example. So I wouldn't have a website about the work that I'm doing. And my projects are kind of scattered all around, so it's not under a specific umbrella. So I have benefited for sure from Wikipedia. I don't want to put words in your mouth though, but you have to acknowledge that artists are getting something out of it. It can be helpful for them to have information about them online.

Rachel Helps: Okay. Yeah. Just so that we're full disclosure here. I significantly edited Glen Nelson's page.

Glen Nelson: Oh!

Rachel Helps: Oh come on, I emailed you about it, but that was part of our work on collections we have in Special Collections. Because Glen, we have your libretto for The Book of Gold opera. Am I remembering that right?

Glen Nelson: Yeah, you have a bunch of things of mine.

Rachel Helps: Yes, we have a bunch of things of yours. So that's why I ended up working on Glnn's page. But now that you've interviewed me, I don't know if I'll ever be able to work on it again.

Glen Nelson: Bummer. Well, that's good because I never want to write another thing now that you've told me that, you know...

Rachel Helps: It benefits readers too, because they're looking for information and we can see the view counts of all the pages that we've ever worked on. It's freely available on any page if you go to View History, View Page, View Statistics. The pages that we've worked on that have the fewest views get at least one view a day. Over the course of a year, that's 365 people that you're helping out just by—it is such an effective way to help people find the information they are looking for. That's where Wikipedia work overlaps with librarianship, right? Because patron-centered librarianship says, we want to help the patrons where they're looking. Well, they are Googling stuff online. So it helps a lot of people find the information they're looking for in collecting areas that we specialize in, that includes Mormon Studies.

Glen Nelson: Well, I've always loved librarians. I have a soft spot for them. I've imagined that their life can be frustrating. They know they have all this amazing stuff in their collection, but they probably thought, how can I get this out there? So are other people on your team, how are they connected with the library? Are they librarians or are they just other people?

Rachel Helps: They are other people. Most of the time my students are undergraduate students, although I recently was able to get an internal grant to fund hiring a graduate student who knows a lot more about poetry than I do. So we haven't been working on Mormon poetry, but we've been working on general poetry pages because it turns out a lot of the literary pages on Wikipedia are not very good. My students, as undergraduates, usually they don't know anything about editing Wikipedia or starting from zero knowledge there. But as they write, they learn a lot about source evaluation, how to summarize something without doing close paraphrasing, putting together information in a way that it makes sense, and how much detail to use. So it's a very practical experience, I feel like, writing on my team. But I do have co-workers who are officially librarians who have specialized training in that. Sometimes we contact them to get help on research if we can't find good sources on our own. 

Glen Nelson: I'm trying to get a sense of the scale of work coming out of your team. I know that it would be easier in a way if they were all from scratch, which they're not. But can you give us some kind of idea about how much work is coming from your project?

Rachel Helps: Yeah, so over the past eight and a half years, we've worked on or created over six hundred pages. Sometimes it's a huge project. Like when I worked on the Hugh Nibley page, that was a really big project; it took me months. Other times it's a page we just kind of cleaned up over the course of a week. Sometimes we create pages and there's not a ton of information about that individual. Like the first woman convert in Mexico, there's not a lot about her, but I was able to write a page for her.

Glen Nelson: I think a lot of LDS listeners are going to equate some of the work you're doing with their own kind of genealogical research. Is it fun to uncover facts? Do you feel like you're a sleuth? Do you sometimes have conflicting data that you need to sort through and make judgments on?

Rachel Helps: Oh, for sure. Although, unlike genealogical research, Wikipedia favors secondary sources. So if you're doing genealogy, you're like, I want to find the birth certificate, the death certificate, the primary source. On Wikipedia they're actually like, don't use public records. We don't trust you to be able to identify the person as being the same as your subject. So they're like, it could be someone else with the same name. But especially with the more historical pages, sometimes sources will disagree and you have to sort of hedge a little bit and be like, “sources disagree on this fact.” For example, I didn't finish my work on the Brigham Young page, but I started it. I think there was controversy over his marriage date, or his baptism date. Anyway, if you look on the Wikipedia page, you can see it. But it was fun to see the disagreement in the biography sources and then trace it to another article that's like, let's discuss this date that we don't know about. And satisfying to be able to be like, yeah, this person discussed all of the possible dates. Except because Brigham Young's page is going to be so long, I didn't go into that. I think I put it in a footnote or something. Another thing that was difficult about his page was this idea that after Joseph Smith died, some people saw, or they had this supernatural experience where they saw the prophetic mantle come upon Brigham Young. How do you talk about a supernatural experience from a neutral encyclopedic point of view, right? Like, “uh, many reported that they heard—” It's a little bit awkward, but we can't not talk about that. That's like one of the really important stories about how the LDS Church continued. So yeah, writing about the supernatural on Wikipedia can be difficult.

Glen Nelson: Oh, I'm sure you have lots of areas that are a little bit problematic. You're trying to figure out the best way to do it. I remember I was giving a talk in church once, and I noticed that people in the congregation were on their phones googling me. I mean, they told me after the fact that they were. So they went to my Wikipedia page and came up to me afterwards and said, “oh, you're somebody.” And I thought, okay. Anyway, I don't know, it did feel like validation a tiny bit. Does that surprise you?

Rachel Helps: It doesn't surprise me at all. Wikipedia pages are important for introducing humans and computers to new information. You might be interested to know that information on Wikipedia and Wikidata is reused in Google's Knowledge Graph. If you Google something and you get the little column on the right-hand side, that's the Knowledge Graph. It usually just pulls the information from Wikipedia, although I've seen it pulled from other sources when there's no Wikipedia page. And personal assistants like Siri and Alexa also use information from Wikipedia. It is such an accessible tool, which is why it's important for us to all work together to make it even better. 

Glen Nelson: So you had mentioned a minute ago, introducing this information to people and computers. So let's shift to AI a little bit. I assume that the ramifications for your wiki work extend farther, potentially, than direct searches, somebody looking up information. So how does or how will AI interact with what you are writing?

Rachel Helps: I've heard that some of the large language model AI's have used Wikipedia as part of the corpus for their language training. But the way that large language models work, they're only going to be able to tell you the words they think are most likely to come together in response to a question. So they don't actually go to sources and pick out information unless you tell them to do that. They cannot really fact check something. After you told me you were going to ask about this, I looked online on Wikipedia, and right now the risk for libel and copyright infringement is too great for editors to agree on using LLMs to aid in writing articles. So that's the status of LLM-AI on Wikipedia. 

Glen Nelson: And for all of us who are not acronym friendly, what does that mean?

Rachel Helps: Oh, the LLM is Large Language Model AI. It's the ones like ChatGPT that have been in the news lately that people, when they talk about AI, it seems like they are always talking about that. But there's more AI than just the large language models. You could make a small language model AI where you're like,  I want you to make a poem that goes on forever, and here's like the permutations of the words that I want you to use. People have done things like that. Or there's also AI that helps— There's a tool that can tell you on Wikipedia if you're— now I'm like, I need to check this. But there's a Wikipedia article called “Artificial Intelligence in Wikimedia Projects”. And there's an objective revision evaluation service that's a project that's an artificial intelligence service for grading the quality of Wikipedia edits. Sometimes it'll mark certain edits as being at risk for vandals, being at risk for being a vandalization edit, if that makes sense. Anti-vandalism editors will use that to to prioritize their edits and be like, oh, the AI thinks this could be vandalism. I'm going to check and see if it is. And if it is, I'm going to revert it.

Glen Nelson: And by vandalism, you mean purposefully misstating things on a Wikipedia page?

Rachel Helps: Yeah, or adding things that aren't true, or simply putting nonsense on it, or blanking the page. Yeah, I don't do a lot of anti-vandalism stuff, but if I see it I revert it.

Glen Nelson: Have you seen your writing pop up in other formats and publications online? 

Rachel Helps: Oh, I have seen—Yes. I don't want to call anyone out on this. The person who cited some of my writing cited the Wikipedia page, and he was just sort of drafting his guidebook to the Mormon Tarot that he's working on, which I am a patron supporter of and I think is really cool. But in his explanation for some of the historical stuff, just as a quick way, he copied and pasted some stuff from Wikipedia and attributed it, which you're allowed to do. I've also seen my work cited, and I don't want to say where it was cited, but it was cited incorrectly, which makes me mad. It was cited to support information that the article itself did not support, and that's not cool. But yeah, you're allowed to to copy and paste Wikipedia stuff as long as you attribute it. 

Glen Nelson: What have you learned from—I'm sure you learned a lot of things about facts—but just philosophically too, what have you learned from your years doing this work?

Rachel Helps: I have learned both humility and pride. Humility when I realize how much I don't know every time I start research on a new topic, and pride in realizing that many Wikipedia pages that I thought were pretty good are actually not good at all. And I realized this when I start scrutinizing their sources. So cleaning those pages up gives me pride, and I take pride in my work. But since I’m paid for my work, I feel like I don't need to get a lot of public recognition for it. But it has made me into a different kind of scholar, I think, because I know very deeply about these weird pockets of information that I've worked on. It makes me aware that every new thing that I encounter, it's going to have various depths of information about it that I can access. 

Glen Nelson: I think we have some things in common there because a lot of my work has been ghostwriting, so I really care about what comes out at the end. Getting credit for that has never appealed to me. I found that limiting. To be known for this thing or that thing in publishing. In that world it really is quite siloed, and it's pretty difficult to have the range of interests and over time write lots and lots of different things like I've been able to do, which I'm very happy about. I get that component of it. I think that you're pretty tough on the work that you do. You're scrutinizing yourself to be as clean as you can on it. I have a friend who's a brick Mason, and he's driving down the street and I say, “do you enjoy looking at other people's brickwork?” He goes, “oh, no, I hate it. All I can see is the mistakes they make.” So he's kind of incapable of seeing things that are not the ideal. I give you credit for being strict and tough, but I will say from my own side of things I have valued a lot the work that you've done in this field, because in many cases it felt like I had no idea about that connection, or I had no idea about where I can find additional work about that person. So, one reader says, I'm really, really grateful to you.

Rachel Helps: Oh, well, thank you. One of the things I realized is a lot of my work has been on Mormon literature pages, because we're a library. We have one of the best collections of Mormon Studies, including Mormon literature, and there are a lot of connections between authors and Church magazines from the early 20th century on that are almost completely unexplored by the secondary sources. To me, that's kind of exciting because it means that if I want to do scholarly research in that field, it'll be pretty easy to find stuff. And at the same time, I'm like, well, why doesn't anyone else? Why hasn't anyone else studied that? I have actually done some research on who killed Mormon literary studies in the 90s and stuff. There are reasons why it's not more studied, but I think that it's time for a change. We can start the scholarly study of Mormon literature again and publish in actual journals so that in the future someone writing a Wikipedia page about Phyllis Barber or maybe someone who doesn't have as much critical acclaim as Phyllis Barber-- You know, everyone says they love The Giant Joshua, but people have not been writing articles on it. They just mention it and then they move on. Anyway, I wrote an article for The Giant Joshua too, and it's like, “rah, rah, rah, the greatest Mormon novel.” But why do people say that? Well, there's a couple of articles on it, but there's more room even on the most highly acclaimed Mormon literature out there.

Glen Nelson: Well, I can give you an example that's related to that. In a few months, I'm curating an exhibition on your campus of the work of John Held Jr. at the end of the year. His cartooning and visual artwork is quite well known, but his fiction was completely unknown. Even the biographer, who was quite excellent, who did a book in the 80s and covered the rest of his career with a lot of scrutiny, just glossed over this. It's like a paragraph. The books weren't even listed. I mean, a couple of them were, but most of them weren't. There was nothing online. I tried to find things as you're describing online; couldn't find anything. So I just started digging, and the way that I dug was to go to rare book dealers. Then one thing led to another thing and one thing led to another thing. So these are all these primary sources, and the books aren't particularly expensive, but they're all long, long, long, long out of print. So I just got copies of all of them because I was just curious what they were. I read all of the books, and I read about the publisher, and I read about how they came about and their connection to magazines, because some of them were excerpted in magazines. None of that was online originally. Then as I read through these books, I realized Mormonism is everywhere in these books, and they're not anywhere, practically, in his commercial work or fine art work. So I thought, well, this is a missing puzzle piece. So, if I had just stopped with what was known online or what was known in books, that would only have told let's say 80% of the story, but this unknown fiction, which was a major part of his life, was completely underrepresented. So I get excited whenever I talk with somebody like you who is in the digging mode. Has there been a surprising find or two that you've found that you want to talk about?

Rachel Helps: Oh, yeah, I'm so happy to talk about it. But you posted about the John Held Jr. fiction, right? Did you write a blog post or a book or something?

Glen Nelson: I published a book, and that book is going to be part of the exhibition again. But yeah. 

Rachel Helps: OK, I remember reading a bit about it. I was like, wow, I had no idea John Held Jr. wrote fiction. So that is so interesting. I hope the exhibition goes really well. When you said that, it reminded me of-- So I did a project a couple of years ago to get images of all the various foreign language Book of Mormons onto Wikipedia, but we have all of them, so that wasn't a problem. But there's a list of Book of Mormon translations page and someone was asking, was the Esperanto translation officially approved by The Church? And I was like, well, I'm not sure. That's when I started the digging for my Mormon Esperanto Society article, and I found out they had a monthly newsletter for it, or it became a tri-monthly newsletter for ten years. I found something they said in there that was like, oh yes, this is officially approved. But then I ended up doing some oral history and interviews and discovering, well, it was officially approved, but it didn't go through their like translation process. That was some research I completely rabbit holed on. That's why we have the history of the Mormon Esperanto Society article coming out soon. But speaking more specifically--

Glen Nelson: Before you jump past that though, what time period are you talking about with Esperanto?

Rachel Helps: That's the 1980s. The language was invented in the late 1800s by Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, a Russian Jew living in Poland, but it remained popular. It's a language invented to facilitate conversation internationally, and the romanticism and international brotherhood and kind of that--

Glen Nelson: A utopian feel about communication globally.

Rachel Helps: Yeah, and a lot of its values really matched up with LDS values of interacting with people across the globe. There were talks at that time that were like, you should be teaching a second language or your mission language to your children. It's really interesting how people who are interested in Esperanto used it as a proselyting tool to go across the Iron Curtain. It wasn't just Eastern Europe that they communicated with. Anyway, it's so interesting that I have to stop myself because I could go on for a full half an hour on it. No further prep. But I also brought out some other examples that aren't just some rabbit hole that I went on. It's research we put on the Wikipedia page.

Glen Nelson: Well, that should be on your business cards: gatekeeper of rabbit holes.

Rachel Helps: I don't want to gatekeep anyone's rabbit holes. Wait, OK. In 1911, Mary Chamberlain and other progressive women in Kanab were elected as mayor and town council, supposedly as a joke. All of them had children at home, but they took on the duties of town council in addition to their housekeeping work for two years. During that time they taxed traveling salesmen, they created a leash law for dogs, they outlawed sling shots, gambling, and the sale of alcohol without a prescription. They also cleaned up the town, built bridges and dikes, and they created a Stink Weed Day with prizes for citizens who cleaned up the town the most. You can read more about her on the Mary Chamberlain Wikipedia page. Another page I worked on that was also a Mormon Studies page was for the Seventh East Press, which was an independent newspaper by BYU students. But my favorite part about it was learning about their April Fool's Day issue that they made as a parody of The Daily Universe. 

Glen Nelson: What time period are you talking about?

Rachel Helps: This is like 1989. They removed all of The Daily Universe issues and replaced it with their own on April Fool's Day. One of their headlines was, “No Censorship at BYU: Everything OK”. That was also the issue where they introduced the “shoe-mirror”, which I guess was a device for them to look up skirts. They were saying, oh, shoe mirrors, are they going to be banned at BYU? It was just a huge joke. It was ridiculous.

Glen Nelson: Now; Rachel, when I type your name into Wiki's search bar, nothing comes up. What's that about?

Rachel Helps: Well, there aren't enough secondary sources about me for me to pass general notability guidelines for me to have my own page, but I do have a user page. If you wanted to look at my user page, it wouldn't--  When you type something in the Wikipedia search bar, you're searching the article namespace, right? Is there a Wikipedia article on the subject? Even if you [type in], “editing guidelines for Wikipedia,” it'll be like, “editing guidelines are when–,” and you're like, “no, I wanted–”. So there's different ways to search the different namespaces. If you do “wp:” and then search something, that searches the Wikipedia namespace; that'll give you help articles and stuff. If you're looking for a username, you do “user:” and my username is “Rachel Helps (BYU)”. So you could find my user page that way.

Glen Nelson: OK, now I want to get back to where we began in our discussion today with your creative work. I'm a writer, so interactive fiction is something that I've been trying to figure out. I don't really know. I've tried to play with it a little bit, but it was a little-- I don't have that kind of mind. I'm a pretty linear guy, and sometimes interactive fiction, in my experience, can go lots of ways. It becomes 3D chess pretty quickly. So how did you get into it? And maybe you could give us an example of a work that you're really proud of that we can send readers to learn more about.

Rachel Helps: Yeah, I grew up playing video games, including the classic point and click adventure games. They kind of grew out of traditional interactive fiction that's parser-based—which just means you type in the commands and it tries to figure out what you want to do. I actually find parser-based interactive fiction super frustrating because I'm like, just tell me what my options are. The other type is called choice-based interactive fiction and that's when you have a list of choices and you can click on them. So interactive fiction also has the distinction between like, are you in a place and you can move around and look at stuff? Or are you in a story and the story moves along and you make choices, right? So there's lots of different kinds. I enjoy both the feeling of being able to move around and also the feeling of being in a narrative that flows. I got really into interactive fiction. I made a guide to Mormon interactive fiction for the Association for Mormon Letters last year. That's also on my itch.io page that I mentioned. There's more than you would think. Although, there's only like seven or eight works. So it's like, Rachel, you're trying to make Mormon interactive fiction happen? Yes, yes, that is something I've tried to make happen. I also wrote up a-- Like if I were teaching interactive fiction, what works would I have people read? I got Steve Peck to read some of the interactive fiction because we want to create an interactive fiction piece together sometime. One example of how the narrative can work is this branch and bottleneck situation where you have a choice, the choice affects things a little bit, but you come back to a central narrative. It makes it a little more manageable from a writer's point of view. A technique we used a lot in my visual novel work and in “Admiration Point” was the idea that one of your choices affects a statistic that the game tracks, which makes it better than a choose your own adventure book in some ways because it can keep track of your choices and the points and stuff. Sometimes with your choices in “Admiration Point”, you can choose whether or not you're going to pursue this obsession with someone and those add to your obsession score. If your obsession score is too high, then at a critical point you'll be like, I can't stop thinking about this, what am I going to do? Then there's also a score for if the person you have a crush on knows, if they've realized that you have a crush on them, although I didn't end up using that for a lot. But you could see how the incremental variables would allow you to give more choices while making the story more linear. 

Glen Nelson: Do you find that people in interactive fiction go through it one way and then go back to the beginning and choose different pathways?

Rachel Helps: Most of the time people only go through an interactive fiction piece once. But the few who like going through and finding all of the possible endings, they really like there to be multiple endings. It does feel dissatisfying to be like, oh, I wrote however many words and people only read half of it. But I don't know. In some ways, it's nice to be able to have the feeling that this story could have gone a different way, and I chose to have it go this way how I wanted it.

Glen Nelson: Yeah. Give me a title again and tell the listeners how they can read it.

Rachel Helps: Oh, okay. So if you want to read “Admiration Point”—which is set in a near future gallery where you're a texture artist who makes the textures for the galleries—you can go to rwelean.itch.io. It's kind of my online moniker. So  if you Google that, I don't know what you're going to find. I'm a little afraid, but that's how you could go play the game for free.

Glen Nelson: Is it for sale? Are these free? How does that work?

Rachel Helps: Yeah, most interactive fiction is traditionally free, especially if it's text only. In some ways, it makes it so the community can try a lot of interactive fiction. Participating in the interactive fiction competition was so fun because everyone was super into reading other people's games and responding to it. I got way more measured responses from “Admiration Point” than from my visual novel work. Even though the visual novels are on Steam and Google Play and lots of people have reviewed them, they did not go into as much narrative criticism as they do on the interactive fiction forums. So I highly recommend, if you're interested in writing interactive fiction, just join the interactive fiction forums; it's a great way to get into it.

Glen Nelson: I guess before we end, tell me about AML Discord. I was on it for a while, but my life got a little bit out of control. What would you recommend that people who are listening to this do to be part of that community?

Rachel Helps: Oh yeah, just feel free to message me or email me for the invite. I just want to make sure you're a human before I give you the invite. If you're interested in research on Mormon literature, or we also have a very active Mormon cinema channel where Randy Astle and Conor Hilton talk about Mormon cinema all the time. I'm like, oh, you guys are really experts on this. I have special boards where we look at—it's called “cons and pubs”—but it's conferences and publications. We post calls for papers or conferences that we think would be good for any budding Mormon literature scholar to to be a part of. We try to help each other with our research, and sometimes we post research finds. Like I found a book of poetry in the collection of—oh shoot, what was her name? I can't think of her name, but she was a Relief Society president for a long time and she was really into social work. Alice Louise Reynolds gave her this poetry book that I hadn't seen anywhere else that had poems about the Salem Witch Trials. Anyway, if you come to the AML Discord, we can share our interesting finds. 

Glen Nelson: OK, so share that email and contact information.

Rachel Helps: Just verbally?

Glen Nelson: Yeah, because people are going to be listening to this and they're going to want to know.

Rachel Helps: They're going to be sitting there with a paper and pen and they're going to write it down.

Glen Nelson: Well—

Rachel Helps: We could just put it in the metadata of the podcast maybe. OK, so my email is rachel_helps@byu.edu. That should work for the next couple of years.
Glen Nelson: On behalf of the Center’s Studio Podcast, I want to thank Rachel Helps for joining us today. I thank you listeners too, and readers I guess. To learn more about the Center, you can go to our website, www.centerforlatterdaysaintarts.org. Goodbye.