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Dear Friends,
This one is a bit on the long side, but you will want to stick around to the end.
Recently I came across this social media post from National Review correspondent and New Criterion music critic Jay Nordlinger:
I thought about this for a brief moment and concluded: he’s right. Boy, is he ever right! Wikipedia has been the butt of a lot of jokes throughout my academic life, but it is something of a miracle. I don’t really live, move, and have my being in academia anymore, but I suspect that snarky comments and eye rolls are still common in those circles: some student “quoted Wikipedia,” hardy har har! (Same people who don’t mind the school President with the requisite intersectional credentials plagiarizing other scholars, of course.) But I can tell you this with great confidence: any professor who claims to disdain Wikipedia … uses Wikipedia all the time. An openly crowd-sourced encyclopedia at your fingertips with nearly every article well-organized, integrated, and hyperlinked with every other article, is unfathomably amazing. If you really think about it, Wikipedia has overtaken the lost Library of Alexandria as one of the wonders of the world.
Wikipedia is so amazing that it is becoming annoying in our house. We can scarcely sit down and have a family conversation without someone saying, “Hang on a minute,” reaching for their phone to look up some bit of trivia we don’t know. We harangue the girls: it’s okay to not know something! But the lure of an instant repository of all the world’s knowledge is very difficult to counteract.
Ah, but is it an instant repository of all the world’s knowledge? That’s what I want to reflect on today. I don’t think by and large the problem with Wikipedia—if such a problem still exists outside the imaginations of its despisers—is “misinformation.” I think the problem is more like consolidation. Over time the facts and narratives about various topics get “slimmed down” and made manageable, for lack of a better word. The sharp edges of history get rounded out and buffed. There’s a “slickness” to a Wikipedia entry that can belie all kinds of complications.
I think the further away we get from historical events, the more fascinating details disappear and the whole saga gets stripped down to basics. I can prove this with a little exercise I find fascinating.
One of the most enjoyable things for me to do, so enjoyable I cannot believe I don’t do it more often (alas, life gets busy), is pull off the shelf one of my volumes of the Ninth Edition (1883) Encyclopædia Brittanica and open to a random page and topic. Let me say a few things about the Brittanica. First, I’m proud that my wife found the entire 28-volume, leather-bound set at an estate sale and we bought it for $22. Second, the writing in the articles is absolutely superb. I’ve never read anything I find dry and dusty and boring. The authors are learned, clearly experts in their fields. Third, there is something extremely joyful and fascinating about reading the extent of what people knew in 1883.
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