‘You know, with Wikipedia, it’s merely a protocol,’ Katherine Maher told me. ‘It’s a reference point, a place that people know has been doing this work already. How do you expand that outwards so that others can join in, getting all that knowledge together around the globe? So there’s just always going to be more to do.’
She wouldn’t do it herself. At the beginning of 2022 she was replaced as CEO by Maryana Iskander, an Egyptian lawyer with degrees from Yale and Oxford. She told the Associated Press that her principal objective was to continue expanding the diversity of Wikipedia’s writers and editors, and by extension its content; the ‘global south’ should have as much presence as the ‘global north’. And beyond this lay the exacting and continual maintenance of one rudimentary principle, the universal right to wisdom. These days, Iskander reasoned, ‘The idea that anything belongs to all of us is really quite revolutionary.’
* Daily interactions may include pages accessed multiple times by the same person. Wikipedia’s own statistics are as fascinating as any article. The data provides a glimpse into use around the world, its changing size month on month, and the number of pages and edits, among many other things. Begin here: https://stats.wikimedia.org
* @depthsofwiki is a great Twitter feed. It may suck up all your spare time.
* The mention of cookery in the Esquire article had its desired effect. A few days after the story appeared, the following line was added to his Wikipedia entry: ‘According to Wales, he is a passionate chef.’
* In December 2021, Wales auctioned his first personal Wikipedia entry – ‘Hello, World!’ – as a non-fungible token (NFT). Christie’s listed the item as a ‘digital sculpture’, and it was a living thing: in a nice twist, Wales enabled his entry to be edited, while also setting a digital timer that would reset the page to its original state. ‘The idea is not just to have an NFT of this moment in time,’ he explained, ‘but to have an NFT which recreates the emotional experience of the moment: here it is, Wikipedia, ready to edit. What will you make of it? What will it become? Will it succeed? Can it really change the world?’
It sold for $750,000, while the strawberry-coloured iMac on which Wales composed the words went for $187,500.
* Shortly after I had fact-checked this section with a regular contributor, the error was corrected.
* According to Citizendium’s own statistics, quoted by Wikipedia, by 27 October 2011 the site had fewer than 100 active members, and Sanger had relinquished his post as editor-in-chief. As of 24 September 2020, it had 17,103 articles, of which 166 had achieved editorial approval, and sixteen contributors who had performed an action in the previous thirty days. Sanger left Citizendium entirely in 2020, announcing he would be forever cheering it on from the sidelines.
* Those were the English language stats. Towards the end of 2021 the number of articles in all the different language editions stood at 57.5 million. German Wikipedia has 2.6 million, French Wikipedia has 2.36m, Dutch 2.06m, Russian 1.76m, Spanish and Italian both about 1.72m. There are two greater figures – the Cebuano language edition with 6 million articles and the Swedish edition with 2.9 million – but these have been largely automatically generated by bots. The Cebuano edition has only 164 active users.
* By contrast, on Britannica.com the article entitled Climate Change is longer, at 12,126 words, and has been principally written by one person, Stephen T. Jackson, Professor Emeritus of Botany at the University of Wyoming. Revisions have been made by five named editors as well as the unnamed ‘Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica’. There are only eighteen major edits listed from 2008 – four in 2021 and five between 2013 and 2020. There is an extensive list of Further Reading, but a small fraction of the links and sources available on Wikipedia. Apart from 100 words, the article is all behind a subscriber paywall.
* His screen background is called Bliss. Unsurprisingly, Bliss has its own page on Wikipedia, which explains that the photo was taken by Charles O’Rear in January 1996, and that Microsoft bought the rights for its Windows operating system in 2000. Its ubiquity may make it the most viewed picture in history.
* Within its pages: the Capacity of Famous Churches, the Area of Oceans, the World’s Earliest Newspapers, and How to Get Rich. Not forgetting How to Get a Passport, the Light from Candles and the Age of Electricity, the Barometer and What it is, How to Take Out a Patent, a List of Pretenders to the House of Bonaparte, the Solar System, and the Speed of Railroads. The light of the Sun was ‘equal to that of 5,563 wax candles held at a distance of one foot from the eye’. How far was the Sun from the Earth? ‘It would take an express train travelling at the rate of 30 miles an hour, day and night, 352 years to reach its destination.’
X
EXTINCTION
According to Wikipedia, Funk & Wagnalls Standard Encyclopedia began life as twenty-five volumes in 1912. In 1931 it was renamed Funk & Wagnalls New Standard Encyclopedia, and by 1945 it was known variously as New Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia, Universal Standard Encyclopedia, Funk & Wagnalls Standard Reference Encyclopedia, and Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia. Like Ben & Jerry’s, its founders Isaac Kaufmann Funk and Adam Willis Wagnalls: a) established a reliable brand based on their name and b) found that their product really took flight when it became available in supermarkets. We have seen how its metamorphosis into Microsoft Encarta helped to destroy the very sector in which it once played a significant role.
What Wikipedia cannot help us with, is what the funk to do with the old print sets when they’re, yes, defunct. ‘The adult reader will find the encyclopedia an indispensable companion throughout his life,’ wrote the renowned Notre Dame University educator George N. Shuster in the preface to an edition from the 1960s. ‘I am sure that this Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia will, as did its predecessors, long hold an honoured place and a well-deserved reputation among English-speaking people everywhere.’ Apparently not. Not if one believes the discussion boards on the homemaker community site thriftyfun.com.
‘Are Funk & Wagnalls encyclopaedias from 1959 worth anything?’ asks a forum member named Diana in August 2011.
‘Unfortunately these old encyclopaedias do not sell at any price,’ replies Kathie K. ‘Most thrift stores will not even accept them as a donated item.’
‘You will never find anyone to take them so just put them out for the trash,’ adds Lilac. ‘Sorry.’
‘Maybe you can use them as a “safe” of sorts,’ suggests Stacy. ‘Just hollow out a portion of the pages to make a “well” and glue the pages’ edges together (but not the front cover or you won’t be able to get in it!).’