The Information - James Gleick [186]
Even then, at the impossible extreme—every person, every bicycle screw—the collection would possess nothing like All Knowledge. For encyclopedias, information tends to come in the form of topics and categories. Britannica framed its organization in 1790 as “a plan entirely new.”♦ It advertised “the different sciences and arts” arranged as “distinct Treatises or Systems”—
And full Explanations given of the
Various Detached Parts of Knowledge, whether relating to Natural and Artificial Objects, or to Matters Ecclesiastical, Civil, Military, Commercial, &c.
In Wikipedia the detached parts of knowledge tend to keep splitting. The editors analyzed the logical dynamics as Aristotle or Boole might have:
Many topics are based on the relationship of factor X to factor Y, resulting in one or more full articles. This could refer to, for example, situation X in location Y, or version X of item Y. This is perfectly valid when the two variables put together represent some culturally significant phenomenon or some otherwise notable interest. Often, separate articles are needed for a subject within a range of different countries due to its substantial differences across international borders. Articles like Slate industry in Wales and Island Fox are fitting examples. But writing about Oak trees in North Carolina or a Blue truck would likely constitute a POV fork, original research, or would otherwise be outright silly.♦
Charles Dickens had earlier considered this very problem. In The Pickwick Papers, a man is said to have read up in the Britannica on Chinese metaphysics. There was, however, no such article: “He read for metaphysics under the letter M, and for China under the letter C, and combined his information.”♦
In 2008 the novelist Nicholson Baker, calling himself Wageless, got sucked into Wikipedia like so many others, first seeking information and then tentatively supplying some, beginning one Friday evening with the article on bovine somatotropin and, the next day, Sleepless in Seattle, periodization, and hydraulic fluid. On Sunday it was pornochanchada (Brazilian sex films), a football player of the 1950s called Earl Blair, and back to hydraulic fluid. On Tuesday he discovered the Article Rescue Squadron, dedicated to finding articles in danger of deletion and saving them by making them better instead. Baker immediately signed up, typing a note: “I want to be a part of this.” His descent into obsession is documented in the archives, like everything else that happens on Wikipedia, and he wrote about it a few months later in a print publication, The New York Review of Books.
I began standing with my computer open on the kitchen counter, staring at my growing watchlist, checking, peeking.… I stopped hearing what my family was saying to me—for about two weeks I all but disappeared into my screen, trying to salvage brief, sometimes overly promotional but nevertheless worthy biographies by recasting them in neutral language, and by hastily scouring newspaper databases and Google Books for references that would bulk up their notability quotient. I had become an “inclusionist.”♦
He concluded with a “secret hope”: that all the flotsam and jetsam could be saved, if not in Wikipedia than in “a Wikimorgue—a bin of broken dreams.” He suggested calling it Deletopedia. “It would have much to tell us over time.” On the principle that nothing online ever perishes, Deletionpedia was created shortly thereafter, and it has grown by degrees. The Port Macquarie Presbyterian Church lives on there, though it is not, strictly speaking, part of the encyclopedia. Which some call the universe.
Names became a special problem: their disambiguation; their complexity; their collisions. The nearly limitless flow of information had the effect of throwing all the world’s items