RIP Encarta, long live Wikipedia
Even though Microsoft claimed Encarta was the world’s best-selling encyclopaedia software, the company announced this week that it would discontinue sales of the CD-ROM shrink-wrapped product in June and shut down the Encarta website in October.
Why abandon the world’s best-selling encyclopaedia software? Because, as we all know, in the world of encyclopaedias, best-selling is meaningless. Most popular is what counts, and by that definition Wikipedia crushes all competitors. The Wikopedia entry in Wikopedia tells us that the site offers 12 million articles in 262 languages, with 2.8 million English entries. Wikipedia receives between 25,000 and 60,000 page requests per second, depending on time of day, with the English version accounting for slightly more than half.
The site was launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, and has since become the most popular general reference work on the Internet. When Time magazine recognized You as its Person of the Year for 2006, acknowledging the accelerating success of online collaboration and interaction by millions of users around the world, it cited Wikipedia as one of three examples of Web 2.0 services, along with YouTube and MySpace.
The NY Times recently reviewed a memoir entitled “The Wikipedia Revolution,” written by Andrew Lih, who was an early Wikpedian. The reviewer, Noam Cohen, says that Wikipedia may be the closest thing to a metropolis yet seen online.
Like a city, Wikipedia is greater than the sum of its parts; for example, the random encounters there are often more compelling than the articles themselves. The search for information resembles a walk through an overbuilt quarter of an ancient capital. You circle around topics on a path that appears to be shifting. Ultimately the journey ends and you are not sure how you got there.
Wikipedia articles can send you down unlikely alleyways in two ways. First, there are links that direct you to the same article in another language, a trippy experience that sheds light on a culture. Spend time in German Wikipedia, and you find jazz musicians like Thelonious Monk with articles far longer than those written in their own language; you may also come upon odd areas of deep interest, like “pecherei,” the extraction of resin from trees - no English equivalent provided - and 15 different tools needed for the job.
Second, at the bottom of most articles, there are the categories - impromptu neighborhoods, or perhaps civic organizations, that bind together the virtual encyclopedia. There are unsurprising ones, like “Jewish comedians,” found at the bottom of the Jerry Seinfeld article; and then there are the quirky kind, like this one I stumbled upon: “Literary devices playing with meaning.” It was in the latter category that I came upon the article “Mondegreen,” which describes the phenomenon of mishearing song lyrics, which led to “Soramimi,” a Japanese term for hearing lyrics in foreign languages as Japanese phrases, which led to the discovery that the heavy metal band Metallica has a line in “Enter Sandman” that frequently is heard by Japanese as “Let’s go to Chiyoda Life Insurance.” Which led to …
It’s a beautiful analogy and gives Wikipedia the respect it deserves. The open-source encyclopaedia is one of the Internet’s most magnificent achievements.
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