The Information by James Gleick
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, 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.
Wikipedia evolves dendritically, sending off new shoots in many directions. (In this it resembles the universe.) So deletionism and inclusionism spawn mergism and incrementalism. They lead to factionalism, and the factions fission into Associations of Deletionist Wikipedians and Inclusionist Wikipedians side by side with the Association of Wikipedians Who Dislike Making Broad Judgments About the Worthiness of a General Category of Article, and Who Are in Favor of the Deletion of Some Particularly Bad Articles, but That Doesn’t Mean They Are Deletionists. Wales worried particularly about Biographies of Living Persons. In an ideal world, where Wikipedia could be freed from practical concerns of maintenance and reliability, Wales said he would be happy to see a biography of every human on the planet. It outdoes Borges.
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 t
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 into a single arena, where they seemed to play a frantic game of Bumper Car. Simpler times had allowed simpler naming: “The Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them,” says Genesis; “and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.” For each creature one name; for each name one creature. Soon, however, Adam had help.
In his novel The Infinities, John Banville imagines the god Hermes saying: “A hamadryad is a wood-nymph, also a poisonous snake in India, and an Abyssinian baboon. It takes a god to know a thing like that.”♦ Yet according to Wikipedia, hamadryad also names a butterfly, a natural history journal from India, and a Canadian progressive rock band. Are we all now as gods? The rock band and the wood nymph could coexist without friction, but more generally the breaking down of information barriers leads to conflict over names and naming rights. Impossible as it seems, the modern world is running out of names. The roster of possibilities seems infinite, but the demand is even greater.
The major telegraph companies, struggling in 1919 with the growing problem of misdirected messages, established a Central Bureau for Registered Addresses. Its central office in the financial district of New York filled an upstairs room on Broad Street with steel filing cabinets. Customers were invited to register code names for their addresses: single words of five to ten letters, required to be “pronounceable”—that is, “made up of syllables that appear in one of eight European languages.”♦ Many customers complained about the yearly charge—$2.50 per code name—but by 1934 the bureau was managing a list of 28,000, including ILLUMINATE (the New York Edison Company), TOOTSWEETS (the Sweet Company of America), and CHERRYTREE (George Washington Hotel).♦ The financier Bernard M. Baruch managed to get BARUCH all to himself. It was first come, first served, and it was a modest harbinger of things to come.
Cyberspace, of course, changes everything. A South Carolina company called Fox & Hound Realty, Billy Benton owner/broker, registered the domain name BARUCH.COM. A Canadian living in High Prairie, Alberta, registered JRRTOLKIEN.COM and held on to it for a decade, until a panel of the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva took it away from him. The name had value; others who claimed an interest in it, as a brand and a trademark, either registered or unregistered, included the late writer’s heirs, publisher, and filmmakers, not to mention the several thousand people worldwide who happened to share his surname. The same High Prairie man was basing a business on his possession of famous names: Céline Dion, Albert Einstein, Michael Crichton, Pierce Brosnan, and about 1,500 more. Some of these people fought back. A select few names—the pinnacles and hilltops—have developed a tremendous concentration of economic value. The word Nike is thought by economists to be worth $7 billion; Coca-Cola is valued at ten times more.
In the study of onomastics it is axiomatic that growing social units lead to growing name systems. For life in tribes and villages, single names like Albin and Ava were enough, but tribes gave way to clans, cities to nations, and people had to do better: surnames and patronyms; names based on geography and occupation. More complex societies demand more complex names. The Internet represents not just a new opportunity for fights over names but a leap in scale causing a phase transition.
An Atlanta music writer known as Bill Wyman received a cease-and-desist letter from lawyers representing the former Rolling Stone bass player also known as Bill Wyman; demanding, that is, that he “cease and desist” using his name. In responding, the first Bill Wyman pointed out that the second Bill Wyman had been born William George Perks. The car company known in Germany as Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG fought a series of battles to protect the name Carrera. Another contender was the Swiss village, postal code 7122. “The village Carrera existed prior to the Porsche trademark,” Christoph Reuss of Switzerland wrote to Porsche’s lawyers. “Porsche’s use of that name constitutes a misappropriation of the goodwill and reputation developed by the villagers of Carrera.” He added for good measure, “The village emits much less noise and pollution than Porsche Carrera.” He did not mention that José Carreras, the opera singer, was embroiled in a name dispute of his own. The car company, meanwhile, also claimed trademark ownership of the numerals 911.
A useful term of art emerged from computer science: namespace, a realm within which all names are distinct and unique. The world has long had namespaces based on geography and other namespaces based on economic niche. You could be Bloomingdale’s as long as you stayed out of New York; you could be Ford if you did not make automobiles. The world’s rock bands constitute a namespace, where Pretty Boy Floyd and Pink Floyd and Pink coexist, along with the 13th Floor Elevators and the 99th Floor Elevators and Hamadryad. Finding new names in this space becomes a challenge. The singer and songwriter long called simply “Prince” was given that name at birth; when he tired of it, he found himself tagged with a meta-name, “the Artist Formerly Known as Prince.” The Screen Actors Guild maintains a formal namespace of its own—only one Julia Roberts allowed.
Pharmaceutical names are a special case: a subindustry has emerged to coin them, research them, and vet them. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration reviews proposed drug names for possible collisions, and this process is complex and uncertain. Mistakes cause death. Methadone, for opiate dependence, has been administered in place of Metadate, for attention-deficit disorder, and Taxol, a cancer drug, for Taxotere, a different cancer drug, with fatal results. Doctors fear both look-alike errors and sound-alike errors: Zantac/Xanax; Verelan/Virilon. Linguists devise scientific measures of the “distance” between names. But Lamictal and Lamisil and Ludiomil and Lomotil are all approved drug names.
In the corporate namespace, signs of overcrowding could be seen in the fading away of what might be called simple, meaningful names. No new company could be called anything like General Electric or First National Bank or International Business Machines. Similarly, A.1. Steak Sauce could only refer to a food product with a long history. Millions of company names exist, and vast sums of money go to professional consultants in the business of creating more. It is no coincidence that the spectacular naming triumphs of cyberspace verge on nonsense: Yahoo!, Google, Twitter.
The Internet is not just a churner of namespaces; it is also a namespace of its own. Navigation around the globe’s computer networks relies on the special system of domain names, like COCA-COLA.COM. These names are actually addresses, in the modern sense of that word: “a register, location, or a device where information is stored.” The text encodes numbers; the numbers point to places in cyberspace, branching down networks, subnetworks, and devices. Although they are code, these brief text fragments also carry the great weight of meaning in the most vast of namespaces. They blend together features of trademarks, vanity license plates, postal codes, radio-station call letters, and graffiti. Like the telegraph code names, anyone could register a domain name, for a small fee, beginning in 1993. It was first come, first served. The demand exceeds the supply.