Posts Tagged ‘reference’
“We have lived in this world where little things are done for love and big things for money. Now we have Wikipedia. Suddenly big things can be done for love.”*…
Since it was launched in 2001, Wikipedia has gone from curiosity to “bane of teachers” to cherished resource– the largest and most-read reference work in history, consistently among the top ten websites visited globally. Free and run by a network of volunteers (it’s hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit funded mainly by donations from readers), it has always been an anomaly– and has always been under some kind of threat.
Tobias Carroll of Inside Hook interviewed author, tech lawyer, and long-time student of Wikipedia Stephen Harrison on what the future might hold– is a tipping point coming?…
Has there ever been a time when Wikipedia wasn’t controversial? The long-running online encyclopedia has sparked plenty of debates since its founding in 2001, and has at various points been the subject of critiques from all across the political spectrum. It’s also an invaluable resource to millions around the world, host to a wealth of knowledge about everything from military battles to defunct sports teams.
Over the years, Stephen Harrison has written extensively about Wikipedia, including in a series of articles at Slate and his newsletter Source Notes. He’s also the author of a recent thriller, The Editors, about the international intrigue surrounding a Wikipedia-like website in the months leading up to the 2020 pandemic.
Harrison spoke with InsideHook about Wikipedia’s shifting place in internet culture, the many threats to it (including those from Elon Musk) and where he sees the encyclopedia going in the years to come…
… [Carroll] We’re now seeing people like Elon Musk targeting Wikipedia with existential criticism. What do you see as the biggest threats to Wikipedia — do you think it’s AI? Is it powerful people looking to make radical changes to how it works?
[Harrison] To some extent, it’s all of the above. I think it’s always under threat; even at the beginning they wondered if it would last and if people would keep contributing to it. There have been alternatives to it, like Conservapedia and RationalWiki and things like that, but they haven’t gotten the same traction. It’s a question of Joan Didion’s point about whether the center will hold. Hopefully Wikipedia will.
Now we have Elon Musk, who’s taken a pretty negative stance against Wikipedia. Of course, that’s very self-serving on his end because he wants people to go to his platform X, right? And he doesn’t like some of the content on his Wikipedia page, even the content that’s true about him being primarily an investor in a lot of these companies. He just doesn’t want to be couched or described as an investor because he has a certain narrative that he’s trying to put out there.
I think that there was always tension in the site. I think that to some extent people wanted to attack Wikipedia for something else, but it was very convenient to say, “Oh no, it’s all about women and minorities and underrepresented groups.” On the other hand, I want to say it does challenge some notions of what is encyclopedic. Wikipedia has kind of a small-c conservative view on topics that are notable.
The definition of notability has been repeat coverage and mainstream reliable sources, which a lot of people in underrepresented groups didn’t have for a long time. There’ll be people on Wikipedia, old-school editors, who’ll take issue with that. Editors aren’t just young guys in Silicon Valley. There are a lot of people — like the character Ed in The Editors — that have just been with the project for a long time, and they have their own views, too. They’ll say, “We’re an encyclopedia. We’re not here to try to right history’s wrongs.”I’m not saying that it needs to get to 50-50 in terms of male and female articles. But for a long time, it was less than 10% [biographical articles about] women. Now it’s like climbing up to 20%, so it’s getting a little bit closer…
… I think the issue is that I’m increasingly finding myself asking AI applications questions that I might have initially gone to Wikipedia for. That pushes Wikipedia further into the background. Are humans going to keep contributing to Wikipedia if it’s perceived that all the information is going to ChatGPT or Perplexity or Grok?
I’ll be interested to see how Wikipedia editors overcome that. Maybe if there’s a silver lining it’s that Wikipedia editors have never been that egotistical. They’re always a little bit behind the scenes. So maybe they won’t mind their information going out to other sources as it does with Google knowledge panels or Alexa or Siri or something like that.
On the other hand, I don’t think they like the idea of it just doing free labor for tech companies. It gets to be a really tough problem: should Google or OpenAI donate more money to the Wikimedia Foundation? But you don’t want there to be any editorial control or any undue influence by Big Tech. So It’s a little bit of a mess. I think that part of it will involve requiring that these LLMs start citing or stating that this information comes from Wikipedia to give some sort of provenance to Wikipedia….
… I’ve been concerned that Wikipedia isn’t recruiting the younger generation. But then every time I’ve expressed worry about that, I find new contributors joining. I think that there’s a certain personality dimension that’s attracted to editing Wikipedia. And those people, hopefully, always find the site.
I think that there’s this political-industrial complex right now where everything is being politicized, right? And the right wing has an interest in portraying Wikipedia as left-wing and a kind of liberal media. What I would hope is that Wikipedia can withstand some of those criticisms. I don’t want only half of the readership to think about Wikipedia as a resource that can be used. But if I had to guess, I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better in terms of partisan rhetoric about Wikipedia…
“How Long Can Wikipedia Hold On?” @tobiascarroll.bsky.social and @stephenharrison.com.
* Clay Shirky
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As we look it up, we might recall that it was on this date in 1991 that Tim Berners-Lee showed the world the first web browser (and first WYSIWYG HTML editor), “WorldWideWeb” (the name of which was changed to “Nexus” after the debut of the World Wide Web later that year to avoid confusion between the brower and the network it was browsing).
“May all beings have happy minds”*…
But then it’s important to be careful as to how we look for that happiness…
– Games where players either remove pieces from a pile or add pieces to it, with the loser being the one who causes the heap to shake (similar to the modern game pick-up sticks)
– Games of throwing dice
– Ball games
– Guessing a friend’s thoughts
Just a few of the entries in “List of games that Buddha would not play,” from the T. W. Rhys Davids‘ translation of the Brahmajāla Sutta (though the list is duplicated in a number of other early Buddhist texts, including the Vinaya Pitaka).
(TotH to Scott Alexander; image above: source)
* the Buddha
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As we endeavor for enlightenment, we might recall that it was on this date in 2001 that Wikipedia was born. A free online encyclopedia that is collaboratively edited by volunteers, it has grown to be the world’s largest reference website, attracting 1.7 billion unique-device visitors monthly as of November 2021. As of January 9, 2022, it has more than fifty-eight million articles in more than 300 languages, including 6,436,030 articles in English (serving 42,848,899 active users of English Wikipedia), with 118,074 active contributors in the past month.
“You can’t just eat good food. You’ve got to talk about it too”*…
In the long timeline of human civilization, here’s roughly how things shook out: First, there was fire, water, ice, and salt. Then we started cooking up and chowing down on oysters, scallops, horsemeat, mushrooms, insects, and frogs, in that general chronological order. Fatty almonds and sweet cherries found their way into our diet before walnuts and apples did, but it would be a couple thousand years until we figured out how to make ice cream or a truly good apple pie. Challah (first century), hot dogs (15th century), Fig Newtons (1891), and Meyer lemons (1908) landed in our kitchens long before Red Bull (1984), but they all arrived late to the marshmallow party — we’d been eating one version or another of those fluffy guys since 2000 B.C.
This is, more or less, the history of human eating habits for 20,000 years, and right now, you can find it all cataloged on the Food Timeline, an archival trove of food history hiding in plain sight on a website so lo-fi you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a GeoCities fanpage. When you look past the Times Roman font and taupe background, the Food Timeline happens to be the single most comprehensive inventory of food knowledge on the internet, with thousands upon thousands of pages of primary sources, cross-checked research, and obsessively detailed food history presented in chronological order. Every entry on the Food Timeline, which begins with “water” in pre-17,000 B.C. and ends with “test tube burgers” in 2013, is sourced from “old cook books, newspapers, magazines, National Historic Parks, government agencies, universities, cultural organizations, culinary historians, and company/restaurant web sites.” There is history, context, and commentary on everything from Taylor pork roll to Scottish tablet to “cowboy cooking.”…
The Food Timeline, in all its comprehensive splendor, was the work of an obsessed person: a New Jersey reference librarian named Lynne Olver. Olver launched the site in 1999, two years before Wikipedia debuted, and maintained it, with little additional help, for more than 15 years. By 2014, it had reached 35 million readers and Olver had personally answered 25,000 questions from fans who were writing history papers or wondering about the origins of family recipes. Olver populated the pages with well-researched answers to these questions, making a resource so thorough that a full scroll to the bottom of the Food Timeline takes several labored seconds….
The entry for soup alone spans more than 70,000 words (The Great Gatsby doesn’t break 50,000), with excerpts from sources like Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat’s A History of Food, John Ayto’s An A-Z of Food and Drink, and D. Eleanor Scully and Terence Scully’s Early French Cookery….
For nearly two decades, Olver’s work was everyone else’s gain. In April of 2015, she passed away after a seven-month struggle with leukemia, a tragedy acknowledged briefly at the bottom of the site. “The Food Timeline was created and maintained solely by Lynne Olver (1958-2015, her obituary), reference librarian with a passion for food history.”
In the wake of Olver’s death, no one has come forward to take over her complex project, leaving a void in the internet that has yet to be filled — and worse, her noble contribution to a world lacking in accurate information and teeming with fake news is now in danger of being lost forever…
The internet’s most comprehensive archive of food history — a passion project of one dedicated librarian — predates Wikipedia. Now, it needs a new custodian: “Who Will Save the Food Timeline?”
* Jailbird
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As we contemplate comestibles, we might recall that it was on this date in 1904 (as the Library of Congress notes) that the first ice cream cone was served.
On July 23, 1904, according to some accounts, Charles E. Menches conceived the idea of filling a pastry cone with two scoops of ice-cream and thereby invented the ice-cream cone. He is one of several claimants to that honor: Ernest Hamwi, Abe Doumar, Albert and Nick Kabbaz, Arnold Fornachou, and David Avayou all have been touted as the inventor(s) of the first edible cone. Interestingly, these individuals have in common the fact that they all made or sold confections at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, known as the St. Louis World’s Fair. It is from the time of the Fair that the edible “cornucopia,” a cone made from a rolled waffle, vaulted into popularity in the United States.
Another claimant, Italo Marchiony, actually received a patent in 1903 for a device to make edible cups with handles. However the patent drawings show the device as a molded container rather than the rolled waffle seen at the Fair. Although paper and metal cones were used by Europeans to hold ice cream and pita bread was used by Middle Easterners to hold sweets, the ice-cream cone seems to have come to America by way of “the Pike” (as the entertainment midway of the St. Louis World’s Fair was called).
Randolph Smith Lyon, Mildred Frances Lyon, Mrs. Montague Lyon (Frances Robnett Smith Lyon), Montague Lyon, Jr., eating ice cream cones at the 1904 World’s Fair. Snapshot photograph, 1904. (Missouri History Museum)
The 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis: site of the national debuts of peanut butter, the hot dog, Dr Pepper, iced tea, cotton candy– and of course, ice cream cones. (source)
“Google can bring you back 100,000 answers; a librarian can bring you back the right one”*
Recently some folks at the New York Public Library discovered a box containing old reference questions from the 1940s to the 1980s. They’re posting the questions to their Instagram account each Monday, noting that “we were Google before Google existed.” Some of the examples include answers; others are… well, probably unanswerable– but all are a reminder of the extraordinary value of the Library and its reference librarians.
People still use an updated version of the service, Ask NYPL; the Library reports that they receive about 1,700 reference questions a month via chat, email, and phone.
Read more at “Before Google, Here’s What New Yorkers Asked The NYPL.”
* Neil Gaiman
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As we keep it down, we might send bibliographic birthday greetings to Archibald MacLeish; he was born on this date in 1892. A Pulitzer Prize-winning poet (Conquistador) and dramatist (JB), MacLeish became “America’s Reference Librarian”– the Librarian of Congress– in 1939.
“Because the world is radically new, the ideal encyclopedia should be radical, too”*…
The current edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica runs to 32 volumes of about 1,375,000 words per volume– 44 million words in all. Wikipedia currently contains 2,537 million words across 4.3 million articles, the equivalent of over 1,900 volumes of Britannica.
click here for larger (and constantly-updated) version
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As we appreciate the prescience of Douglas Adams, we might send well-organized birthday greetings to Arnold Neustadter; he was born on this date in 1910. A businessman with a flare for invention, Neustadter created the Autodex, a spring-operated phone directory that automatically opened to the selected letter, Swivodex, an inkwell that did not spill, Punchodex, a paper hole puncher, and Clipodex, a transcription aid that attached to a stenographer’s knee. But his masterwork, created in 1956 with Hildaur Neilsen, was the rotary contact file, the Rolodex.
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