Bruno’s idea these days is for the creation of an elite corps of rowing police. Each would patrol a section of the city, standing up, using a smaller type of boat called a s’ciopon. Such floating mounties used to exist; because their boats were smaller and nimbler than the existing police motorboats, they could keep an eye on the narrow canals, too, which are now sometimes completely blocked by scofflaws. Oar-cops would be able to feel for themselves the destabilizing effect of waves in a way that existing Polizia and Caribinieri can’t; they would know better what gondoliers contend with every day. “But if I talk like that with someone, they think I come from Mars,” Bruno told me.
Shouldn’t it be possible to institute an ora-remi—an oar hour, or two, in the middle of the afternoon (when business slows down anyway) during which only human-powered vehicles would be allowed on all the canals of Venice? Several big four- or six-oared barges, like the baroque burchielli that once plied the river Brenta to and from Padua, could then peaceably proceed, stuffed with happy map-flapping tourists, from San Marco up the Grand Canal, in place of the ubiquitously groaning No. 1 vaporetto. Imagine daylit water that had calmed down enough to reflect, as it once did, the Redentore or the porphyritic palazzi disappearing around the curve of the Grand Canal. Imagine the water-taxi men chewing at their toothpicks from the sidelines. Imagine the history-sheltering silence. Gondolas would pour from their moorings to celebrate, wedding bells would swing in their leaning towers, women would kiss their husbands or their gondoliers, and everyone would weep and spend lots of money.
(1998)
The Charms of Wikipedia
Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It’s fact-encirclingly huge, and it’s idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking, and full of simmering controversies — and it’s free, and it’s fast. In a few seconds you can look up, for instance, “Diogenes of Sinope,” or “turnip,” or “Crazy Eddie,” or “Bagoas,” or “quadratic formula,” or “Bristol Beaufighter,” or “squeegee,” or “Sanford B. Dole,” and you’ll have knowledge you didn’t have before. It’s like some vast aerial city with people walking briskly to and fro on catwalks, carrying picnic baskets full of nutritious snacks.
More people use Wikipedia than Amazon or eBay — in fact, it’s up there in the top-ten Alexa rankings with those moneyed funhouses MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube. Why? Because it has 2.2 million articles, and because it’s very often the first hit in a Google search, and because it just feels good to find something there — even, or especially, when the article you find is maybe a little clumsily written. Any inelegance, or typo, or relic of vandalism reminds you that this gigantic encyclopedia isn’t a commercial product. There are no banners for E
Trade or Classmates.com, no side sprinklings of AdSense.
It was constructed, in less than eight years, by strangers who disagreed about all kinds of things but who were drawn to a shared, not-for-profit purpose. They were drawn because for a work of reference Wikipedia seemed unusually humble. It asked for help, and when it did, it used a particularly affecting word: “stub.” At the bottom of a short article about something, it would say, “This article about X is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.” And you’d think, That poor sad stub: I will help. Not right now, because I’m writing a book, but someday, yes, I will try to help.
And when people did help they were given a flattering name. They weren’t called “Wikipedia’s little helpers,” they were called “editors.” It was like a giant community leaf-raking project in which everyone was called a groundskeeper. Some brought very fancy professional metal rakes, or even back-mounted leaf-blowing systems, and some were just kids thrashing away with the sides of their feet or stuffing handfuls in the pockets of their sweatshirts, but all the leaves they brought to the pile were appreciated. And the pile grew and everyone jumped up and down in it having a wonderful time. And it grew some more, and it became the biggest leaf pile anyone had ever seen anywhere, a world wonder. And then self-promoted leaf-pile guards appeared, doubters and deprecators who would look askance at your proffered handful and shake their heads, saying that your leaves were too crumpled or too slimy or too common, throwing them to the side. And that was too bad. The people who guarded the leaf pile this way were called “deletionists.”
But that came later. First it was just fun. One anonymous contributor wrote, of that early time:
I adored the Wikipedia when it was first launched and I contributed to a number of articles, some extensively, and always anonymously. The Wikipedia then was a riot of contributors, each adding bits and pieces to the articles they were familiar with, with nary an admin or editor in sight.
It worked and grew because it tapped into the heretofore unmarshaled energies of the uncredentialed. The thesis procrastinators, the history buffs, the passionate fans of the alternate universes of Garth Nix, Robotech, Half-Life, P. G. Wodehouse, Battlestar Galactica, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charles Dickens, or Ultraman — all those people who hoped that their years of collecting comics or reading novels or staring at TV screens hadn’t been a waste of time — would pour the fruits of their brains into Wikipedia, because Wikipedia added up to something. This wasn’t like writing reviews on Amazon, where you were just one of a million people urging a tiny opinion and a Listmania list onto the world — this was an effort to build something that made sense apart from one’s own opinion, something that helped the whole human cause roll forward.
Wikipedia was the point of convergence for the self-taught and the expensively educated. The cranks had to consort with the mainstreamers and hash it all out — and nobody knew who really knew what he or she was talking about, because everyone’s identity was hidden behind a jokey username. All everyone knew was that the end product had to make legible sense and sound encyclopedic. It had to be a little flat — a little generic — fair-minded — compressed — unpromotional — neutral. The need for the outcome of all edits to fit together as readable, unemotional sentences muted — to some extent — natural antagonisms. So there was this exhilarating sense of mission — of proving the greatness of the Internet through an unheard-of collaboration. Very smart people dropped other pursuits and spent days and weeks and sometimes years of their lives doing “stub dumps,” writing ancillary software, categorizing and linking topics, making and remaking and smoothing out articles — without getting any recognition except for the occasional congratulatory barnstar on their user page and the satisfaction of secret fame. Wikipedia flourished partly because it was a shrine to altruism — a place for shy, learned people to deposit their trawls.
But it also became great because it had a head start: from the beginning the project absorbed articles from the celebrated 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which is in the public domain. And not only the 1911 Britannica. Also absorbed were Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, Nuttall’s 1906 Encyclopedia, Chambers’s Cyclopedia, Aiken’s General Biography, Rose’s Biographical Dictionary, Easton’s Bible Dictionary, and many others. In August 2001, a group of articles from W. W. Rouse Ball’s Short Account of the History of Mathematics—posted on the Net by a professor from Trinity College, Dublin — was noticed by an early Wikipedian, who wrote to his co-volunteers: “Are they fair game to grab as source material for our wikipedia? I know we are scarfing stuff from the 1911 encyclopedia, this is from 1908, so it should be under the same lack of restrictions. . ” It was. Rouse Ball wrote that Pierre Varignon was an intimate friend of Newton, Leibniz, and the Bernoullis and, after l’Hopital, was the earliest and most powerful advocate in France of the use of differential calculus. In January 2006, Wikipedia imported this 1908 article, with an insertion and a few modernizing rewordings, and it now reads: