recent thought / activity
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loving / hating wikipedia
I was mightily pleased by Nicholson Baker's piece "The Charms of Wikipedia," which appeared recently at/in the New York Review of Books. It's nominally a review of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, by John Broughton, but really it's a opportunity for Baker to deliver a big love letter to Wikipedia. Turns out he not only approves of Wikipedia (which surprised me, given his legendary hatred of digital card catalogs and digital newspaper archives), but has also been a Wikipedia contributor. Hm! In true Baker style, the thing that lures him in is a desire to save articles that are marked for deletion. It's apparent, from reading Baker's books, that he loves even the most minute details of human existence, and it's really (charmingly) in keeping with his personality that he can't bear the thought of losing the entry on someone like Vladimir Narbut, "a minor Russian Acmeist poet whose second book, Halleluia, was confiscated by the police." I've done my share of Wikipedia editing, too, although the thing that often draws me in is born less of love than it is of revulsion: I stumble upon some page that is so mind-bogglingly awful that it stimulates a near-compulsory desire to fix it. This happened most recently regarding the page on (of all things) Nudity in film, which, as you might imagine, had become the repository for some rather unsavory kipple throughout its existence. (My work on it is not complete: see, for instance, the stuff about "a brief shot up Jessica Rabbit's dress" down at the bottom of the page for a representative example of the stuff I've been carving away from it.) I'm no expert on nudity in film or anything, but I more-or-less know how to organize and fix bad writing, which makes Wikipedia an occasionally-irresistable pasttime for me.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
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