The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

by James Gleick

In 2008 the novelist Nicholson Baker, calling himself Wageless, got sucked into Wikipedia like so many others, first seeking information and then tentatively supplying some, beginning one Friday evening with the article on bovine somatotropin and, the next day, Sleepless in Seattle, periodization, and hydraulic fluid. On Sunday it was pornochanchada (Brazilian sex films), a football player of the 1950s called Earl Blair, and back to hydraulic fluid. On Tuesday he discovered the Article Rescue Squadron, dedicated to finding articles in danger of deletion and saving them by making them better instead. Baker immediately signed up, typing a note: “I want to be a part of this.” His descent into obsession is documented in the archives, like everything else that happens on Wikipedia, and he wrote about it a few months later in a print publication, The New York Review of Books.