By Steve Rhodes
“Wikipedia is just an incredible thing,” Nicholson Baker writes in a New York Review of Books review of John Broughton’s Wikipedia: The Missing Manual.
“It’s fact-encirclingly huge, and it’s idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking, and full of simmering controversies – and it’s free, and it’s fast. In a few seconds you can look up, for instance, ‘Diogenes of Sinope,’ or ‘turnip,’ or ‘Crazy Eddie,’ or ‘Bagoas,’ or ‘quadratic formula,’ or ‘Bristol Beaufighter,’ or ‘squeegee,’ or ‘Sanford B. Dole,’ and you’ll have knowledge you didn’t have before. It’s like some vast aerial city with people walking briskly to and fro on catwalks, carrying picnic baskets full of nutritious snacks.”
Baker is stupendously right, and that’s why I’m a huge Wikipedia fan.
“It was constructed, in less than eight years, by strangers who disagreed about all kinds of things but who were drawn to a shared, not-for-profit purpose. They were drawn because for a work of reference Wikipedia seemed unusually humble. It asked for help, and when it did, it used a particularly affecting word: ‘stub.’ At the bottom of a short article about something, it would say, ‘This article about X is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.’ And you’d think: That poor sad stub: I will help. Not right now, because I’m writing a book, but someday, yes, I will try to help.”
Like Craigslist, Wikipedia is an example of the wondrous, innovative and organic nature of the Internet.
“It worked and grew because it tapped into the heretofore unmarshaled energies of the uncredentialed. The thesis procrastinators, the history buffs, the passionate fans of the alternate universes of Garth Nix, Robotech, Half-Life, P.G. Wodehouse, Battlestar Galactica, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charles Dickens, or Ultraman – all those people who hoped that their years of collecting comics or reading novels or staring at TV screens hadn’t been a waste of time – would pour the fruits of their brains into Wikipedia, because Wikipedia added up to something.”
The reaction against Wikipedia, mostly by standard newspaper types, is not only misguided but ignorant about what it really is and how it really works.
“But it also became great because it had a head start: from the beginning the project absorbed articles from the celebrated 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which is in the public domain. And not only the 1911 Britannica. Also absorbed were Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, Nuttall’s 1906 Encyclopedia, Chamber’s Cyclopedia, Aiken’s General Biography, Rose’s Biographical Dictionary, Easton’s Bible Dictionary, and many others. In August 2001, a group of articles from W.W. Rouse Ball’s Short Account of the History of Mathematics – posted on the Net by a professor from Trinity College, Dublin – was noticed by an early Wikipedian, who wrote to his co-volunteers: ‘Are they fair game to grab as source material for our wikipedia? I know we are scarfing stuff from the 1911 encyclopedia, this is from 1908, so it should be under the same lack of restrictions . . . . ‘ It was.”
Wikipedia, in fact, is better than a traditional encyclopedia. Because it is so much more.
The common complaint that Wikipedia isn’t reliable is absurd. Most Wikipedia entries are footnoted to sources – encyclopedias are not. That alone makes Wikipedia a superior research tool. Studies have also shown that Wikipedia’s accuracy rivals – if not bests – that of traditional encyclopedias, which are typically full of entries scrubbed clean with “objectivity” masquerading as the word of God.
And perhaps best, Wikipedia is filled with entries on songs, TV shows, catch phrases, celebrities, mysteries – created and updated with a frightening immediacy (and an admirable elasticity).
Are there blunders? Sure.
“The Pop-Tarts page is often aflutter. Pop-Tarts, it says as of today (February 8, 2008), were discontinued in Australia in 2005. Maybe that’s true. Before that it said that Pop-Tarts were discontinued in Korea. Before that Australia. Several days ago it said: ‘Pop-Tarts is german for Little Iced Pastry O’ Germany.’ Other things I learned from earlier versions: More than two trillion Pop-Tarts are sold each year. George Washington invented them. They were developed in the early 1960s in China. Popular flavors are ‘frosted strawberry, frosted brown sugar cinnamon, and semen.’ Pop-Tarts are a ‘flat Cookie.’ No: ‘Pop-Tarts are a flat Pastry, KEVIN MCCORMICK is a FRIGGIN LOSER notto mention a queer inch.’ No: ‘A Pop-Tart is a flat condom.’ Once last fall the whole page was replaced with NIPPLES AND BROCCOLI!!!!!'”
On the other hand . . . how great is that?
All hail Wikipedia. You are (deservedly) loved.
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The same people who whine about Wikipedia are likely those who rail about YouTube as the playpen of cat owners who got video cameras for their birthdays.
I beg to differ.
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Or those who repeat one of the most well-worn bugaboos of the Internet era – that bloggers are crazy people in basements wearing pajamas.
I beg to differ.
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Most of the complainants, again, are standard newspaper folk; the people you would expect to be most open-minded, progressive, innovative . . . are in fact . . . something else. How sad.
Jewel Box
From Michael Azerrad’s review in the New York Times of Dan Kennedy’s Rock On:
“He attends a meeting about Jewel’s song ‘Intuition,’ which she has licensed to a line of women’s razors, also called Intuition. ‘Anyone in the room who knows the irony of a song about not selling out being used to sell razors,’ Kennedy writes, ‘displays a perfect professional poker face.
“‘I, on the other hand, am most likely doing the thing where I stifle disbelief and then start getting paranoid that I totally don’t understand what’s going on and that it’s showing on my face, and then I get paranoid that you can get cancer this way.'”
Posted on March 4, 2008