And then Wikipedia got bigger. By the end of 2003, Wikipedia had more than 100,000 articles in English, and in 2005 the figure exceeded 750,000. By 2008, the figure topped 2 million, and by October 2021 the figure was 6.39 million. The total number of words on the site (not including discussion and other behind-the-scenes entries) has increased from 4.8 million at the beginning of 2002 to 1.8 billion in 2010 to 3.98 billion by 20 October 2021. The number of people who had used Wikipedia up to that date came to 42,410,237.*
The first mention of global warming – an eighty-word article noting an increase in surface temperature over the last 150 years and stating ‘whether this increase is significant or not is open to debate’ – appeared in October 2001. By 23 October 2021, a week before the global climate summit in Glasgow, the name of the entry had become Climate Change and stood at almost 8640 words. It had received 25,396 edits at an average rate of 4.4 per day. There were 14,252 links directing readers to the article from other pages, and 924 directions to external links. There were 347 references, and hyperlinks to more than 200 peer-reviewed sources. Over the previous year the entry had been viewed 1,911,705 times.
The entry titled Climate Change, like a great many other articles on topics deemed important, was ‘semi-protected’: it meant there were restrictions on new edits that could be made at any point. Anyone wishing to make a change would have had to be a ‘confirmed’ user, which meant having a registered account for at least four days and making at least ten other edits in that time. An edit would then be moderated, and possibly challenged or removed for a stated reason, often due to a lack of a recognised source.*
Long after it was shown to work, and once it had become hugely popular, the executives at Wikipedia found themselves skilled at coming up with retrospective summations of desire. ‘When we talk about Wikipedia being a free encyclopaedia,’ one said, ‘what we’re really talking about is not the price that it takes to access it, but rather the freedom that you have to take it and adapt it and use it however you like.’ Someone else had another thought: ‘We make the Internet not suck.’
Wikipedia has an obvious and magnificent advantage over the print stores it supplanted: incredible speed. Britannica in particular had the habit of being published in the same month as calamitous events. (A new printing of the fourteenth edition arrived from the printers just three weeks before Germany invaded Poland; a new printing on thin Indian onion paper in July 1945 narrowly managed to miss the dropping of the first atomic bomb.) These days, when someone notable dies, the cause of death is on Wikipedia before the funeral.
Similarly, the prevalence of what may best be described as dubiousness in print might have a pernicious effect for decades, much to our amusement today. How best to treat tuberculosis, for example? ‘The most sovereign remedy,’ Britannica’s first edition assured, ‘is to get on horseback everyday.’ Childhood teething could, the encyclopaedia assured, be treated by the placing of leeches beneath the ears (in those days leeches cured everything). The ninth edition, published volume by volume between 1875 and 1889, advised its readers on how to become a vampire (get a cat to jump over your corpse), while thirty years later the eleventh found werewolves ‘in leopard form’ among ‘the people of Banana (Congo)’.
I looked up ‘People of Banana’ on Wikipedia and found this: ‘The page “People of Banana” does not exist. You can ask for it to be created, but consider checking the search results below to see whether the topic is already covered.’ The search results included Banana, Banana republic, Banana leaf, Banana Fish, Banana ketchup, Speech banana, Banana Yoshimoto and everyone’s favourite, Banana sundae.
So I asked for ‘People of Banana’ to be created. I prepared my entry: ‘The “People of Banana” is said to be one location where you may find werewolves.’ I cited ‘Entry on Werewolves, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition (1910–11), as referenced in Britannica’s special 250th anniversary collector’s edition, 2018.’
I didn’t hold out much hope. My submission joined 2160 other pending submissions, 114 of which had been waiting five weeks for a Wikipedia administrator to approve or dismiss it (other recent submissions included items whose titles I didn’t understand: ‘Dog Puller’, ‘IBTS Greenhouse’ and ‘Bug Music’).
My administrator would probably dismiss my Banana entry on the grounds that it did not pass muster. ‘There is a very good chance that the topic is not notable and will never be accepted as an article,’ the guidelines informed me. Other reasons why my entry could be rejected were divided into thirty-four subcategories, including ‘declined as a non-notable film’, ‘declined as jokes’, ‘declined as not written in a neutral point of view’ and – the ultimate – ‘declined as not suitable for Wikipedia’.
I had a vague twenty-first-century fear that something – anything – connecting banana with Africa might be rejected on the basis of racial assumption. But then, with almost all hopes dashed, I found that I had mis-searched, and a place called Banana in the Democratic Republic of Congo did indeed have its own entry, albeit a tiny one. There was no mention of the people of Banana specifically, and none of werewolves, but I learnt that Banana was a very small seaport situated in Banana Creek, an inlet about 1km wide on the north bank of the Congo River’s mouth, separated from the ocean by a spit of land 3km long and 100 to 400m wide.
The article, like all articles on Wikipedia, was accompanied by its own ‘History’ page, a behind-the-scenes catalogue of the edits that had made the page accurate and compliant, and attuned to house style. Often, these ‘making of’ comments are more fascinating than the article they scrutinise. In this case, a Danish contributor called Morten Blaabjerg – one of relatively few to use a real name (other editors on this Banana page plumped for Warofdreams, Prince Hubris and Tabletop) – added the ‘Henry’ to ‘Henry Morton Stanley’ (Stanley used Banana as a starting-off point for an expedition in 1879).
That edit was made in July 2005. The page had received relatively few edits since its inception the year before, although for a short while in 2007 there was a nice little hoo-ha over whether Banana was a seaport or a township. As far as contributor Morten Blaabjerg goes, we learn that he now lives in Odense, but was born in 1973 in the small southern Danish town of Strib, near Middelfart.
WUB
On Thursday, 7 May 2020, at five to seven in the evening, a man calling himself ‘the wub’, added the following sentence to the article Exploding Animaclass="underline" ‘The Los Angeles Herald in 1910 reported a duck which exploded after consuming yeast.’