The Information - James Gleick [184]
After the occasional turmoil, articles tend to settle toward permanence; still, if the project seems to approach a kind of equilibrium, it is nonetheless dynamic and unstable. In the Wikipedia universe, reality cannot be pinned down with finality. That idea was an illusion fostered in part by the solidity of a leather-and-paper encyclopedia. Denis Diderot aimed in the Encyclopédie, published in Paris beginning in 1751, “to collect all the knowledge that now lies scattered over the face of the earth, to make known its general structure to the men with whom we live, and to transmit it to those who will come after us.” The Britannica, first produced in Edinburgh in 1768 in one hundred weekly installments, sixpence apiece, wears the same halo of authority. It seemed finished—in every edition. It has no equivalent in any other language. Even so, the experts responsible for the third edition (“in Eighteen Volumes, Greatly Improved”), a full century after Isaac Newton’s Principia, could not bring themselves to endorse his, or any, theory of gravity, or gravitation. “There have been great disputes,” the Britannica stated.
Many eminent philosophers, and among the rest Sir Isaac Newton himself, have considered it as the first of all second causes; an incorporeal or spiritual substance, which never can be perceived any other way than by its effects; an universal property of matter, &c. Others have attempted to explain the phenomena of gravitation by the action of a very subtile etherial fluid; and to this explanation Sir Isaac, in the latter part of his life, seems not to have been averse. He hath even given a conjecture concerning the matter in which this fluid might occasion these phenomena. But for a full account of … the state of the dispute at present, see the articles, Newtonian Philosophy, Astronomy, Atmosphere, Earth, Electricity, Fire, Light, Attraction, Repulsion, Plenum, Vacuum, &c.
As the Britannica was authoritative, Newton’s theory of gravitation was not yet knowledge.
Wikipedia disclaims this sort of authority. Academic institutions officially distrust it. Journalists are ordered not to rely upon it. Yet the authority comes. If one wants to know how many American states contain a county named Montgomery, who will disbelieve the tally of eighteen in Wikipedia? Where else could one look for a statistic so obscure—generated by a summing of the knowledge of hundreds or thousands of people, each of whom may know of only one particular Montgomery County? Wikipedia features a popular article called “Errors in the Encyclopaedia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia.” This article is, of course, always in flux. All Wikipedia is. At any moment the reader is catching a version of truth on the wing.
When Wikipedia states, in the article “Aging,”
After a period of near perfect renewal (in humans, between 20 and 35 years of age [citation needed]), organismal senescence is characterized by the declining ability to respond to stress, increasing homeostatic imbalance and increased risk of disease. This irreversible series of changes inevitably ends in death,
a reader may trust this; yet for one minute in the early morning of December 20, 2007, the entire article comprised instead a single sentence: “Aging is what you get when you get freakin old old old.”♦ Such obvious vandalism lasts hardly any time at all. Detecting it and reversing it are automated vandalbots and legions of human vandal fighters, many of them proud members of the Counter-Vandalism Unit and Task Force. According to a popular saying that originated with a frustrated vandal, “On Wikipedia,