The Information (73 page)

“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.

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 273 ran along the base of Ore Red Hill, outside of Whitehall. Near Ore Red Hill, the highway intersected with a local road, which connected to US 4.”) There are pages for every known enzyme and human gene. The
Encyclopaedia Britannica
never aspired to such breadth. How could it, being made of paper?

Alone among the great enterprises of the early Internet, Wikipedia was not a business; made no money, only lost money. It was supported by a nonprofit charity established for the purpose. By the time the encyclopedia had 50 million users daily, the foundation had a payroll of eighteen people, including one in Germany, one in the Netherlands, one in Australia, and one lawyer, and everyone else was a volunteer: the millions of contributors, the thousand or more designated “administrators,” and, always a looming presence, the founder and self-described “spiritual leader,” Jimmy Wales. Wales did not plan initially the scrappy, chaotic,
dilettantish, amateurish, upstart free-for-all that Wikipedia quickly became. The would-be encyclopedia began with a roster of experts, academic credentials, verification, and peer review. But the wiki idea took over, willy-nilly. A “wiki,” from a Hawaiian word for “quick,” was a web site that could be not just viewed but edited, by anyone. A wiki was therefore self-created, or at least self-sustaining.

Wikipedia first appeared to Internet users with a simple self-description:

The sparseness of the coverage that first year could be gauged by the list of requested articles. Under the heading of Religion: “Catholicism?—Satan?—Zoroaster?—Mythology?” Under Technology: “internal combustion engine?—dirigible?—liquid crystal display?—bandwidth?” Under Folklore: “(If you want to write about folklore, please come up with a list of folklore topics that are actually recognized as distinct, significant topics in folklore, a subject that you are not likely to know much about if all you’ve done along these lines is play Dungeons and Dragons, q.v.).”
^♦
Dungeons and Dragons was already well covered. Wikipedia was not looking for flotsam and jetsam but did not scorn them. Years later, in Alexandria, Jimmy Wales said: “All those people who are obsessively writing about Britney Spears or the Simpsons or Pokémon—it’s just not true that we should try to redirect them into writing about obscure concepts in physics. Wiki is not paper, and their time is not owned by us. We can’t say, ‘Why do we have these employees doing stuff that’s so useless?’ They’re not hurting anything. Let them write it.”

“Wiki is not paper” was the unofficial motto. Self-referentially, the
phrase has its own encyclopedia page (see also “
Wiki ist kein Papier
” and “
Wikipédia n’est pas sur papier
”). It means there is no physical or economic limit on the number or the length of articles. Bits are free. “Any kind of metaphor around paper or space is dead,” as Wales said.

Wikipedia found itself a mainstay of the culture with unexpected speed, in part because of its unplanned synergistic relationship with Google. It became a test case for ideas of crowd intelligence: users endlessly debated the reliability—in theory and in actuality—of articles written in an authoritative tone by people with no credentials, no verifiable identity, and unknown prejudices. Wikipedia was notoriously subject to vandalism. It exposed the difficulties—perhaps the impossibility—of reaching a neutral, consensus view of disputed, tumultuous reality. The process was plagued by so-called edit wars, when battling contributors reversed one another’s alterations without surcease. At the end of 2006, people concerned with the “Cat” article could not agree on whether a human with a cat is its “owner,” “caregiver,” or “human companion.” Over a three-week period, the argument extended to the length of a small book. There were edit wars over commas and edit wars over gods, futile wars over spelling and pronunciation and geopolitical disputes. Other edit wars exposed the malleability of words. Was the Conch Republic (Key West, Florida) a “micronation”? Was a particular photograph of a young polar bear “cute”? Experts differed, and everyone was an expert.

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.

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,”

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, there is a giant conspiracy attempting to have articles agree with reality.” This is about right. A conspiracy is all the Wikipedians can hope for, and often it is enough.

Lewis Carroll, near the end of the nineteenth century, described in fiction the ultimate map, representing the world on a unitary scale, a mile to a mile: “It has never been spread out, yet. The farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight.”
^♦
The point is not lost on Wikipedians. Some are familiar with a debate carried out by the German branch about the screw on the left rear brake pad of Ulrich Fuchs’s bicycle. Fuchs, as a Wikipedia editor, proposed the question, Does this item in the universe of objects merit its own Wikipedia entry? The screw was agreed to be small but real and specifiable. “This is an object in space, and I’ve seen it,”
^♦
said Jimmy Wales. Indeed, an article appeared in the German Meta-Wiki (that is, the Wikipedia
about
Wikipedia) titled “
Die Schraube an der hinteren linken Bremsbacke am Fahrrad von Ulrich Fuchs
.”
^♦
As Wales noted, the very existence of this article was “a meta-irony.” It was written by the very people who were arguing against its suitability. The article was not really about the screw, however. It is
about a controversy: whether Wikipedia should strive, in theory or in practice, to describe the whole world in all its detail.

Opposing factions coalesced around the labels “deletionism” and “inclusionism.” Inclusionists take the broadest view of what belongs in Wikipedia. Deletionists argue for, and often perform, the removal of trivia: articles too short or poorly written or unreliable, on topics lacking notability. All these criteria are understood to be variable and subjective. Deletionists want to raise the bar of quality. In 2008 they succeeded in removing an entry on the Port Macquarie Presbyterian Church, New South Wales, Australia, on grounds of non-notability. Jimmy Wales himself leaned toward inclusionism. In the late summer of 2007, he visited Cape Town, South Africa, ate lunch at a place called Mzoli’s, and created a “stub” with a single sentence: “Mzoli’s Meats is a butcher shop and restuarant located in Guguletu township near Cape Town, South Africa.” It survived for twenty-two minutes before a nineteen-year-old administrator called ^demon deleted it on grounds of insignificance. An hour later, another user re-created the article and expanded it based on information from a local Cape Town blog and a radio interview transcribed online. Two minutes passed, and yet another user objected on grounds that “this article or section is written like an advertisement.” And so on. The word “famous” was inserted and deleted several times. The user ^demon weighed in again, saying, “We are not the white pages and we are not a travel guide.” The user EVula retorted, “I think if we give this article a bit more than a couple of hours of existence, we might have something worthwhile.” Soon the dispute attracted newspaper coverage in Australia and England. By the next year, the article had not only survived but had grown to include a photograph, an exact latitude and longitude, a list of fourteen references, and separate sections for History, Business, and Tourism. Some hard feelings evidently remained, for in March 2008 an anonymous user replaced the entire article with one sentence: “Mzoli’s is an insignificant little restaurant whose article only exists here because Jimmy Wales is a bumbling egomaniac.” That lasted less than a minute.