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"Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It's fact-encirclingly huge..."

By Ann Althouse

"... 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."

The novelist Nicholson Baker has a big NYRB essay on Wikipedia (and "Wikipedia: The Missing Manual"). I didn't go looking for this after writing the last post and mentioning that Wikipedia has what is almost only a stub on "A Room of One's Own." It just turned up as the next thing in my email box. But look at this:

... 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.

So, there's your argument countering mine. I called the short entry evidence of female underachievement. But you can say that all those scholars and literati with knowledge of and love for "A Room of One's Own" are off writing books. And you can build on that: Editing is traditionally a woman's work, properly shunned by the heroic women who are creating and composing their own tomes, perhaps expounding Woolf's slim volume.

I like the Nicholson Baker books I've read, like "Room Temperature," "Mezzanine," and "Double Fold." Pop quiz: What Nicholson Baker book did Monica Lewinsky give to Bill Clinton? Answer here ? in the Wikipedia entry for Nicholson Baker. It's "Vox" ? that book about phone sex. I haven't read that one. Sorry. Apparently, libraries interest me more than phone sex. (Or books about.) I have this vague feeling that I was once offended by some political thing NB once wrote. Dare I search my archives to see what I have against someone I like after I've forgotten what it is?

Full post as published by Althouse on March 03, 2008 (boomark / email).