‘Come on. It takes forever. This is why I don’t use these.’
‘R-E-A … Oh, I’m getting close!’
‘Ah, Reading. I found it!’
[Host:] ‘Now let’s test the encyclopaedia. Come up with anything that you can think of.’
‘Are there people in encyclopaedias? Let’s look up Tycho Brahe. Tycho Brahe was an astronomer who was most famous for having his nose cut off in a battle and it was replaced with a metal nose. Here’s Braiding. Here’s Bracks. Brahe, Tycho! Heyyyy!’
[Host:] ‘Can you imagine relying just on these books for information compared to the information that’s at your fingertips today?’
‘In theory I could.’
‘I would hate it, I would hate it, I would hate it.’
‘Five whole minutes of my life is gone! When I could have found it .000098 seconds with Google.’
[Host:] Are there any advantages to a physical encyclopaedia compared to the Internet or Wikipedia?’
‘I’m pretty sure there is, but no.’
The video has been watched more than 4 million times. It left me with the intended reaction, a very clear sense of how something so much a part of my life for so long can suddenly seem so absurd to a younger generation. World Book isn’t like the vinyl LP; it shows no sign of making a comeback. It’s more like the horse and cart; you can understand it, and you can understand how eager we were to grasp its brilliant if problematic replacement.
Y
YESTERDAY
Throughout their editing work on Wikipedia, the wub and The Anome were aware of many principles – ground rules, foundational ethics, stylistic recommendations – that guided their contributions, and chief among them was the concept of neutrality. For the encyclopaedia to reflect knowledge rather than opinion, and to limit the time its writers and users spent in endless argument, Wikipedia strove for impartiality and objectivity. The Anome was thus discouraged from writing about ‘Thank You NHS’ as ‘heart-warming’, no matter how universally true this was considered to be.
All of Wikipedia’s hundreds of thousands of other active registered editors are expected to abide by two further policy cornerstones: verifiability and the notion of No Original Research. All material and quotation open to challenge must be attributed to a reliable, published source. The familiar ‘citation needed’ tag is a note from one editor to another that a linked source is absent and should be supplied, or in time the material will be removed. Wikipedia has several paragraphs devoted to what may or may not be regarded as a reliable source: published books, recognised journals, trusted newspapers and other media channels are generally acceptable, while social media and personal blogs are usually frowned upon.*
The concept of an encyclopaedia with No Original Research is something that many first-time editors and many first-time readers find hard to grasp. The rule insists that no facts, ideas or allegations may appear on Wikipedia’s main pages for which no reliable published sources exist. A source should exist for all material, even for statements that are unlikely to be challenged. So whenever The Anome or the wub created a new article or amended an old one, let’s say on Noah’s Ark or the ozone layer, they could only do so if they were based on writing or thinking that already existed. It was a distinct type of creativity, one rewarding affirmation more than pioneering or inceptive thought. It was the world as it was, rather than how it could be, which one might also assume might make it less of a venue for controversy or dispute.
But a problem remained. ‘I always advise people to check the sources,’ Peter Coombe (the wub) told me. It was not enough to have citations, because these too could be unreliable, or even fabricated. The fact checkers had to fact-check the fact checks. Which would naturally make the general reader wonder: how could one know what one knew?
On 15 October 1968, the guests sat down to velouté of Cornish crab, fillet of Dover sole in Cheshire sauce, quail in port wine aspic, a mint sorbet palate cleanser followed by noisette of Southdown lamb, and pears in Madeira. Encyclopaedia Britannica was 200 years old, and damned if there wasn’t going to be a party.
The 500 guests at the Guildhall in the City of London included Prime Minister Harold Wilson, the editor of The Times, the director of the British Museum, the Lord Mayor, the Lord High Commissioner, a great many masters and vice-chancellors of universities, representatives of forty press and broadcasting outlets, the directors of the Wallace Collection and the Victoria and Albert Museum, controllers of BBC radio, deans of several cathedrals, high-ups at W.H. Smith, W. & G. Foyle and W. Heffer, poet Stephen Spender, novelist Anthony Powell, the chairman of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, and two great-great-granddaughters and one great-great-grandson of Britannica’s first editor William Smellie.
The Queen sent a telegram with warmest congratulations and thanked the board of editors for her special anniversary edition (full morocco). Britannica’s chairman Senator William Benton gave a speech, as did its newly appointed editor-in-chief Sir William Haley. Everyone thanked everyone. There had been some rocky periods, everyone said, not least during wars and depressions, but the encyclopaedia pulled through and would always pull through. It was, as Dr Robert M. Hutchins, chairman of the board of editors, proclaimed, ‘the common expression, the common possession, and the common contribution of the English-speaking peoples. This institution, and this one alone, symbolises the joint effort of those peoples to engage on a world scale in the highest of all human activities, learning and teaching.’*
Everyone looked forward to their grandchildren and great-grandchildren celebrating Britannica’s 300th anniversary in 2068. The champagne was Charles Heidsieck 1959.
Six months earlier, an exhibition celebrating the same anniversary opened at the Newberry Library in Chicago. The items on display included many early editions of Britannica, and copies of its forerunners, including Historia naturalis (Pliny the Elder), Etymologiae (Isidore of Seville), Speculum historiale (Vincent de Beauvais), Francis Bacon’s classification of knowledge expounded in Instauratio magna, and Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia.
The show also displayed the typescript, with additions, of Leon Trotsky’s biography of Lenin for the thirteenth edition, written in 1925. Trotsky was paid $106, which he pocketed just before fleeing Moscow. ‘The article,’ an exhibition card explains, ‘is reasonably accurate and surprisingly dispassionate.’ Of particular interest elsewhere is a collection of letters from the archives, predominantly noteworthy for their narrow range of subject matter. Most are complaints from contributors about either the space allotted to them or the rate of pay. A few request a deadline extension to allow for the inclusion of an upcoming statute or conference. One reflects an editor’s desire for accuracy: having asked Nikola Tesla to confirm whether he was born on 9 or 10 July 1856, the inventor replied that he was born at midnight between the two.
No one in 1968 would have dared suggest that the exhibition would one day come to resemble a shrine. The meteorite in the sky wasn’t yet visible; Britannica’s entry on Economic Forecasting was too interested in existing markets to worry about the shrinking of computers or their inter-networking. And when the New York Times reviewed John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies in 1996, and saw in it a reassessment of the American Dream, surely no one at Britannica’s headquarters in Chicago who might have read the novel would have agreed with Clarence Wilmot’s assessment that all the information within an encyclopaedia ‘breaks your heart at the end, because it leaves you as alone and bewildered as you were not knowing anything’.