The Information - James Gleick [182]
“All the lost plays of the Athenians!”♦ wails Thomasina (a young mathematician who resembles Ada Byron) to her tutor, Septimus, in Tom Stoppard’s drama Arcadia. “Thousands of poems—Aristotle’s own library … How can we sleep for grief?”
“By counting our stock,” Septimus replies.
You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language.
Anyway, according to Borges, the missing plays can be found in the Library of Babel.
In honor of the lost library, Wikipedia drew hundreds of its editors to Alexandria in the eighth summer of its existence—people called Shipmaster, Brassratgirl, Notafish, and Jimbo who ordinarily meet only online. More than 7 million such user names had been registered by then; the pilgrims came from forty-five countries, paying their own way, toting laptops, exchanging tradecraft, wearing their fervor on their T-shirts. By then, July 2008, Wikipedia comprised 2.5 million articles in English, more than all the world’s paper encyclopedias combined, and a total of 11 million in 264 languages, including Wolof, Twi, and Dutch Low Saxon, but not including Choctaw, closed by community vote after achieving only fifteen articles, or Klingon, found to be a “constructed,” if not precisely fictional, language. The Wikipedians consider themselves as the Great Library’s heirs, their mission the gathering of all recorded knowledge. They do not, however, collect and preserve existing texts. They attempt to summarize shared knowledge, apart from and outside of the individuals who might have thought it was theirs.
Like the imaginary library of Borges, Wikipedia begins to appear boundless. Several dozen of the non-English Wikipedias have, each, one article on Pokémon, the trading-card game, manga series, and media franchise. The English Wikipedia began with one article and then a jungle grew. There is a page for “Pokémon (disambiguation),” needed, among other reasons, in case anyone is looking for the Zbtb7 oncogene, which was called Pokemon (for POK erythroid myeloid ontogenic factor), until Nintendo’s trademark lawyers threatened to sue. There are at least five major articles about the popular-culture Pokémons, and these spawn secondary and side articles, about the Pokémon regions, items, television episodes, game tactics, and all 493 creatures, heroes, protagonists, rivals, companions, and clones, from Bulbasaur to Arceus. All are carefully researched and edited for accuracy, to ensure that they are reliable and true to the Pokémon universe, which does not actually, in some senses of the word, exist. Back in the real world, Wikipedia has, or aspires to have, detailed entries describing the routes, intersections, and histories of every numbered highway and road in the United States. (“Route 273 [New York State, decommissioned in 1980] began at an intersection with U.S. Route 4 in Whitehall. After the intersection, the route passed the Our Lady of Angels Cemetery, where it turned to the southeast. Route