The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

by James Gleick

Lewis Carroll, near the end of the nineteenth century, described in fiction the ultimate map, representing the world on a unitary scale, a mile to a mile: “It has never been spread out, yet. The farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight.” The point is not lost on Wikipedians. Some are familiar with a debate carried out by the German branch about the screw on the left rear brake pad of Ulrich Fuchs’s bicycle. Fuchs, as a Wikipedia editor, proposed the question, Does this item in the universe of objects merit its own Wikipedia entry? The screw was agreed to be small but real and specifiable. “This is an object in space, and I’ve seen it,” said Jimmy Wales. Indeed, an article appeared in the German Meta-Wiki (that is, the Wikipedia about Wikipedia) titled “Die Schraube an der hinteren linken Bremsbacke am Fahrrad von Ulrich Fuchs.” As Wales noted, the very existence of this article was “a meta-irony.” It was written by the very people who were arguing against its suitability. The article was not really about the screw, however. It is about a controversy: whether Wikipedia should strive, in theory or in practice, to describe the whole world in all its detail.

Wikipedia evolves dendritically, sending off new shoots in many directions. (In this it resembles the universe.)

Or rhizomatically might be more accurate

In The Pickwick Papers, a man is said to have read up in the Britannica on Chinese metaphysics. There was, however, no such article: “He read for metaphysics under the letter M, and for China under the letter C, and combined his information.”

He concluded with a “secret hope”: that all the flotsam and jetsam could be saved, if not in Wikipedia than in “a Wikimorgue—a bin of broken dreams.” He suggested calling it Deletopedia. “It would have much to tell us over time.”

The info middens!

When the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary began digitizing its contents in 1987 (120 typists; an IBM mainframe), they estimated its size at a gigabyte. A gigabyte also encompasses the entire human genome.

Its physical aspect could not be less cloudlike. Server farms proliferate in unmarked brick buildings and steel complexes,

This hidden infrastructure grows in a symbiotic relationship with the electrical infrastructure it increasingly resembles. There are information switchers, control centers, and substations. They are clustered and distributed. These are the wheel-works; the cloud is their avatar.

the old becomes as accessible as the new. Yellowed newspapers come back to life.

And yet everyone forgot to archive the yellow pages

In the first days of radio Bertolt Brecht, hopeful, fearful, and quite obsessed, expressed this feeling aphoristically: “A man who has something to say and finds no listeners is bad off. Even worse off are listeners who can’t find anyone with something to say to them.”

the lengths of their individual tracks and consulting a vast database, formed by accretion over years, by the shared contributions of millions of anonymous users. In 2007 this database revealed something that had eluded distinguished critics and listeners: that more than one hundred recordings released by the late English pianist Joyce Hatto—music by Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart, Liszt, and others—were actually stolen performances by other pianists.