Varignon was a friend of Newton, Leibniz, and the Bernoulli family. Varignon’s principal contributions were to graphic statics and mechanics. Except for l’Hôpital, Varignon was the earliest and strongest French advocate of differential calculus.
But the article is now three times longer, barnacled with interesting additions, and includes a link to another article discussing Varignon’s mechanical theory of gravitation.
The steady influx of top-hat-and-spatted sources elevated Wikipedia’s tone. This wasn’t just a school encyclopedia, a back-yard Encarta—this was drinks at the faculty club. You looked up Diogenes, and bang, you got something wondrously finished-sounding from the 1911 Britannica. That became Diogenes’ point of departure. And then all kinds of changes happened to the Greek philosopher, over many months and hundreds of revisions — odd theories, prose about the habits of dogs, rewordings, corrections of corrections. Now in Wikipedia there is this summary of Diogenes’ provocations:
Diogenes is said to have eaten (and, once, masturbated) in the marketplace, urinated on some people who insulted him, defecated in the theatre, and pointed at people with his middle finger.
And yet amid the modern aggregate, some curvy prose from the 1911 Britannica still survives verbatim:
Both in ancient and in modern times, his personality has appealed strongly to sculptors and to painters.
The fragments from original sources persist like those stony bits of classical buildings incorporated in a medieval wall.
But the sources and the altruism don’t fully explain why Wikipedia became such a boomtown. The real reason it grew so fast was noticed by cofounder Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales in its first year of life. “The main thing about Wikipedia is that it is fun and addictive,” Wales wrote. Addictive, yes. All big Internet successes — e-mail, AOL chat, Facebook, Gawker, Second Life, YouTube, Daily Kos, World of Warcraft—have a more or less addictive component — they hook you because they are solitary ways to be sociaclass="underline" you keep checking in, peeking in, as you would to some noisy party going on downstairs in a house while you’re trying to sleep.
Brion Vibber, who was for a while Wikipedia’s only full-time employee, explained the attraction of the encyclopedia at a talk he gave to Google employees in 2006. For researchers it’s a place to look stuff up, Vibber said, but for editors “it’s almost more like an online game, in that it’s a community where you hang out a bit, and do something that’s a little bit of fun: you whack some trolls, you build some material, et cetera.” Whacking trolls is, for some Wikipedia editors, a big part of why they keep coming back.
Say you’re working away on the Wikipedia article on aging. You’ve got some nice scientific language in there and it’s really starting to shape up:
After a period of near perfect renewal (in Humans, between 20 and 50 years of age), organismal senescence is characterized by the declining ability to respond to stress, increasing homeostatic imbalance and increased risk of disease. This irreversible series of changes inevitably ends in Death.
Not bad!
And then somebody — a user with an address of 206.82.17.190, a “vandal”—replaces the entire article with a single sentence: “Aging is what you get when you get freakin old old old.” That happened on December 20, 2007. A minute later, you “revert” that anonymous editor’s edit, with a few clicks; you go back in history to the article as it stood before. You’ve just kept the aging article safe, for the moment. But you have to stay vigilant, because somebody might swoop in again at any time, and you’ll have to undo their harm with your power reverter ray. Now you’re addicted. You’ve become a force for good just by standing guard and looking out for juvenile delinquents.
Some articles are so out of the way that they get very little vandalism. (Although I once fixed a tiny page about a plant fungus, Colletotrichum trichellum, that infects English ivy; somebody before me had claimed that 40 percent of the humans who got it died.) Some articles are vandalized a lot. On January 11, 2008, the entire fascinating entry on the aardvark was replaced with “one ugly animal”; in February the aardvark was briefly described as a “medium-sized inflatable banana.” On December 7, 2007, somebody altered the long article on bedbugs so that it read like a horror movie:
Bedbugs are generally active only at dawn, with a peak attack period about an hour before dawn, though given the opportunity, they may attempt to feed at your brain at other times.
A few weeks later, somebody replaced everything with:
BED BUGS MOTHER FUCKER THEY GON GET YO MOTHAFUCKING ASS BRAAAAAAAT FOOL BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP.
A piece of antivandalism software, VoABot II, reverted that edit, with a little sigh, less than a minute after it was made.
Vandalism spiked in August 2006 after comedian Stephen Colbert — in the wake of Stacy Schiff’s excellent but slightly frosty New Yorker article about Wikipedia — invited viewers of his show to post made-up facts about the increase in the population of African elephants, as proof of the existence of something that was not reality but “wikiality”—a cheap shot, but mildly funny. People repeatedly went after the elephant page, and it was locked for a while. But not for very long. The party moved on.
The Pop-Tarts page is often aflutter. Pop-Tarts, it says as of today (February 8, 2008), were discontinued in Australia in 2005. Maybe that’s true. Before that it said that Pop-Tarts were discontinued in Korea. Before that Australia. Several days ago it said: “Pop-Tarts is german for Little Iced Pastry O’ Germany.” Other things I learned from earlier versions: More than two trillion Pop-Tarts are sold each year. George Washington invented them. They were developed in the early 1960s in China. Popular flavors are “frosted strawberry, frosted brown sugar cinnamon, and semen.” Pop-Tarts are a “flat Cookie.” No: “Pop-Tarts are a flat Pastry, KEVIN MCCORMICK is a FRIGGIN LOSER not to mention a queer inch.” No: “A Pop-Tart is a flat condom.” Once last fall the whole page was replaced with “NIPPLES AND BROCCOLI!!!!!”
This sounds chaotic, but even the Pop-Tarts page is under control most of the time. The “unhelpful” or “inappropriate”—sometimes stoned, racist, violent, metal-headed — changes are quickly fixed by human stompers and algorithmicized helper bots. It’s a game. Wikipedians see vandalism as a problem, and it certainly can be, but a Diogenes-minded observer would submit that Wikipedia would never have been the prodigious success it has been without its demons.