Wikipedia, Google, and the death of Dewey

My previous posting led me to think about the Encyclopedia Brittanica that my parents, like so many others, bought for our family when I was young. It was a big financial commitment for a family teetering on the line between the working class and middle class.

Long before the internet, those encyclopedias fanned my interest in random bits of information. As a child, I believed that all knowledge was contained in those volumes, and that I could learn everything there was to know, just by working my way from Aardvarks to Zygotes. I embraced the idea that knowledge was power, and invested countless hours working towards omniscience.

It was only years later that I realized how limited the Encyclopedias actually were. They provided a good overview of the natural and scientific world, but offered sparse detail and no qualitative ideas. The inherent limits of bookshelf space (and the number of trees in the world) reduced every entry to a single page or less.
At some point in my pre-teens, I lost interest and - though I continued to use it for school projects - I stopped reading it for leisure and never did finish the full set. But I always knew it was there, available for questions that did not require more than a single page to answer. I don't recall what happened to our encyclopedia. Maybe we donated it, maybe we sold it, maybe it ended up in a trash heap. Regardless, like the hardcover dictionary, it is a relic of the pre-information age.

Between Google and Wikipedia, there is an unreadable amount of knowledge at our disposal. Wikipedia is now growing by about 2 million words a month, so you could spend a lifetime consuming its content and always have more left unread than when you started. My son will never have the disappointment of realizing an apparently simple question would require research and the dewey decimal system (another dying tool - sorry Melvil).

Google almost anything, and the Wikipedia entry is usually the top result. Yet - while Google is worth over a hundred billion dollars - Wikipedia remains non-profit. It is the fifth largest website on the net, yet Jimmy Wales continues to stick to his questionable guns and refuses to monetize it. Personally, I would have no problem ignoring a few adds on Wikipedia's pages if it helped ensure the accuracy and completeness of the entries. I am sure it will happen sooner or later...

That being said, I am happy to support Wikipedia through donations until Mr. Wales stops hating money. You can do the same, just by clicking the link below: