You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf From Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia

by Jack Lynch

  Reviewing Schott for the Christian Science Monitor, Mark Luce linked the two works of this chapter: “The last time I experienced such a response to a compendium of useless information was in fifth grade, when a 1980 edition of ‘The Guinness Book of World Records’ landed in my grubby mitts.”17 Guinness and Schott are part of a genre that includes Michael Powell’s Back in the Day: 101 Things Everyone Used to Know How to Do, Mental Floss Presents Condensed Knowledge: A Deliciously Irreverent Guide to Feeling Smart Again, and Slate magazine’s Explainer. The Library of Congress has assigned some of these the brilliantly nonspecific subject heading “Handbooks, vade-mecums, etc.”

  Their shared success is noteworthy. “More intriguing than any mere fact in Schott’s,” JoAnn Gutin observed on its first appearance, “is the philosophical question raised by its popularity. In A.D. 2003, when anyone with a high-speed Internet connection can get the basics of any subject within 10 seconds, does the world need collections like this?” Her conclusion: “From an informational standpoint, probably not.”18 Perhaps the ready availability of so much information, when any idle curiosity can be settled with only a few seconds’ labor, makes books about nothing special—that is to say, things we would never search for—all the more desirable. They remind us that reports of the death of hard-copy reference books, even in the age of Google and Wikipedia, are considerably exaggerated.

  EPILOGUE

  THE WORLD’S INFORMATION

  The Encyclopedic Dream

  In November 1619, the young René Descartes had a series of dreams.1 In the first, a powerful whirlwind blew past his college, knocking him down. In the second, he saw and heard an explosion coming from the small stove in his room. In the third, he saw on his desk a familiar collection of Latin poetry, the Corpus poetarum, next to a huge dictionary. Descartes used the word dictionnaire, but it seems he had something more like an encyclopedia in mind—the word encyclopédie was not common when he wrote. On waking, Descartes interpreted the dictionary in his dream as representing “toutes les Sciences ramassées ensemble,” “all knowledge gathered together.” This was part of the turning point in the life of the young philosopher. He concluded, “I thought I could do no better than … devote all my life to cultivating my reason and advancing as far as I could in the knowledge of the truth.”2

  We have dreamed about that dictionary for millennia, though we might call it an encyclopedia, a miscellany, even a database: at that level the distinctions between genres break down. The notion of collecting all the world’s knowledge in one place has been a goal—for some, an obsession—for as long as there has been writing. All fifty of the primary works considered here, as well as the thousands that were not included, are in some sense failures, even if many of them are glorious failures. Every dictionary, every encyclopedia, every atlas leaves questions unanswered. As the historian of encyclopedias Richard Yeo puts it, “Encyclopaedic dreams have almost always outrun achievements.”3

  The encyclopedic dream echoes throughout history. In the seventh century B.C.E., Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria, assembled a library—“the first documented attempt to collect all knowledge systematically.”4 A more famous attempt came a few centuries later, in the Library of Alexandria. In the modern era, in 1895, a Belgian professor of law named Paul Otlet and a legislator named Henri La Fontaine founded an Institut International de Bibliographie, later named the Mundaneum, which accumulated 16 million index cards in an attempt to catalog the world’s knowledge according to their new system, the Universal Decimal Classification. Eventually, more ambitious souls aspired to collect the world’s information not in a library but in a single book, albeit a large one, thinking their work would render all previous books unnecessary.5

  The Chinese have a long tradition of encyclopedias that aspire to be comprehensive. One of the most impressive is the Four Great Books of Song, by Li Fang and others in tenth- or eleventh-century China. The text runs to 14 million words, making it one of the largest works ever written to that point. Even that looks scrawny, though, compared to one of its successors, the Yonglè dàdian, or “Great Canon or Vast Documents of the Yongle Era,” sometimes known as the Yongle Encyclopedia. This work, put together between 1403 and 1408 by a large team—five chief directors supervised twenty subdirectors, who oversaw 2,169 scholars—once ran to 11,095 volumes and about 370 million words. It was compiled in the hope of collecting “everything that had ever been written on Confucian religion, history, philosophy, arts, and sciences,”6 and it incorporated into itself the full text of between seven and eight thousand classical Chinese works. The book was too long to be printed, and the consequences were grim: most of it has been lost. But another Chinese encyclopedia from 1725 to 1726, the Qinding Gujin tushu jicheng (Complete Collection of Writings from Earliest to Current Times), was printed in more than three quarters of a million pages and 100 million words, making it one of the longest works ever printed.7

  The dream was every bit as alive in the West. Medieval philosophers and theologians aspired to write a summa, a single work that would encapsulate everything known, at least everything worth knowing. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologica (1265–74) is the most famous of the summae, but splendidly immodest titles like Radulfus Ardens’s Speculum universale (Universal Mirror) and Rabanus Maurus Magnentius’ De rerum naturis, sometimes known as De universo (On the Universe), show the kind of thing they had in mind. Most of these works were meant to be read through—though with Aquinas’s Summa theologica running to more than 2 million words, how many people have actually done so is open to question—but Nicholas de Byard’s Summa de abstinentia (late thirteenth century) and Bartolomeo of San Concordio’s Summa de casibus coscientiae (1338) were presented in alphabetical order, aligning them with reference books.

  In the modern era the presumption grew. Ephraim Chambers, for instance, boasted in 1727 that his Cyclopaedia would “answer all the Purposes of a Library,”8 and Victorian booksellers turned out keys to all mythologies with admirable regularity. What is not to love about a work called Enquire Within upon Everything (1856)? H. G. Wells, Britain’s leading man of letters a century ago, waxed messianic when he wrote about a “world encyclopaedia” that would solve all our species’ problems. This “new social organ” would be “the means whereby we can solve the problem of that jig-saw puzzle and bring all the scattered and ineffective mental wealth of our world into something like a common understanding.”9 One of Wells’s early commentators saw the connection of his project with the ancient and medieval summae: “The impossible dream of intellectual order is at least a dream of respectable antiquity, and it is being dreamed still by thousands if not millions of people. It sees the human mind as ultimately concerned with all that is knowable in the universe.”10

  The encyclopedic dream got a technological inflection in the middle of the twentieth century when Vannevar Bush proposed a device he called a “memex,” which would not only assemble the world’s knowledge but make it more easily accessible than ever before. He imagined microphotographic technology installed in a workstation the size of a large desk, with links between microfilm frames that would allow users to zip easily around the world’s knowledge—a clear precursor of the hypertext technology that makes the World Wide Web possible. “The Encyclopedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox,” Bush wrote as the Second World War came to an end:

  A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk. If the human race has produced since the invention of movable type a total record, in the form of magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertising blurbs, correspondence, having a volume corresponding to a billion books, the whole affair, assembled and compressed, could be lugged off in a moving van.

  The technology was not yet developed in 1945, when Bush published As We May Think, but by the early 1990s, networked personal computers had taken the place of microfilm, photocells, and servomotors.11

  Comprehensive reference books show up in fiction, too. Gustave Flaubert’s Bou
vard and Pécuchet (1881) try to read everything ever written on every branch of human knowledge and to summarize the results. Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” (1942) features an Encyclopedia Galactica, and Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) gives us the greatest of them all:

  In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker’s Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.

  First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.12

  Today we tend to have our encyclopedic dreams on the Internet. Google’s corporate mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Wikipedia “Imagine[s] a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.”13 And while some reference books have left their mark on the language, Google is unique in having become a verb. Within just thirteen months of its public unveiling in September 1998, it became possible to Google. We turn to Google for information on just about anything. Never before in history has a single reference held such monopolistic power over information.

  Wikipedia, the student’s savior and the teacher’s bane, is the product of a confluence of several technologies. In 1994, early in the age of the World Wide Web, the programmer Ward Cunningham developed a series of programs to allow people to work together on a database using only their web browsers. Since it was a quick and easy way to edit text, he remembered the name of a bus at the Honolulu International Airport, the “Wiki Wiki Shuttle,” itself named for the Hawaiian word for “quick.” At first the community of participants was limited to the computer-savvy, but eventually it became accessible even to amateurs. And when, in 2000, Wiki ran into a project called Nupedia—a fairly conventional encyclopedia, a for-profit venture with a managing editor, expert contributors, and a seven-step approval process for entries—a new approach to reference publishing came into being.14

  Wikipedia was launched into the world with very few rules, the most famous of which was summed up as IAR—“ignore all rules.” “If rules make you nervous and depressed,” one early version read, “and not desirous of participating in the Wiki, then ignore them and go about your business.”15 But they added three central policies that have guided Wikipedia ever since: NPOV, or “neutral point of view”; V, or “verifiability”; and NOR, or “no original research.” No one knew what to expect in a dictionary written by unpaid volunteers with no editorial supervision, but within just one year, twenty thousand articles had been written, and the volume of the encyclopedia and the number of queries were straining their computing power. By March 2003, more than a hundred thousand articles had been drafted, roughly the number in many of the major commercial encyclopedias. But soon they would leave the commercial encyclopedias far behind. On March 1, 2006, the one millionth entry was contributed: an article on Jordanhill, a Scottish railway station. As historian Stacy Schiff points out, the history of that article is typical of the way Wikipedia entries mutate: “Its author, Ewan MacDonald, posted a single sentence about the station at 11 P.M., local time; over the next twenty-four hours, the entry was edited more than four hundred times, by dozens of people.”16

  TITLE: Wikipedia: The Free Encylopedia

  COMPILER: Jimmy Wales (1966–) and Larry Sanger (1968–)

  PUBLISHED: January 15, 2001

  VOLUMES: 0

  PAGES: 0

  ENTRIES: 4,681,440 in English, written and revised by 23,584,715 volunteers; 1.8 million in Dutch, 1.7 million in German, 1.6 million in French, 1.6 million in Swedish, 1.3 million in Waray-Waray, 1.2 million in Chinese, 1.2 million in Russian, 1.2 million in Visayan, 1.1 million in Spanish, 1.1 million in Polish, 1.1 million in Vietnamese, 938,000 in Japanese, 848,000 in Portuguese, 785,000 in Chinese, 535,000 in Ukrainian, 441,000 in Catalan, 428,000 in Persian, 400,000 in Norwegian, 359,000 in Finish, 350,000 in Indonesian, 336,000 in Arabic, 308,000 in Czech, 294,000 in Korean, 274,000 in Serbo-Croatian, 271,000 in Malay, 270,000 in Hungarian, 254,000 in Romanian, 254,000 in Serbian, 237,000 in Turkish, 222,000 in Minangkabau, 210,000 in Kazakh, 205,000 in Esperanto, 204,000 in Basque, 196,000 in Slovak, 192,000 in Danish, 169,000 in Bulgarian, 168,000 in Lithuanian, 166,000 in Hebrew, 149,000 in Croatian, 143,000 in Slovene, 128,000 in Estonian, 108,000 in Simple English, 101,000 in Greek, 105,000 in Hindi, 91,000 in Thai, and 3.7 million more in 193 other languages, for a total of 33.4 million

  TOTAL WORDS: 2.714 billion in English, 18 billion total

  SIZE: none

  AREA: none

  WEIGHT: none

  PRICE: free

  LATEST EDITION: Every edition is the latest edition

  These two resources have displaced so many others that they constitute an epoch in reference publishing: future ages will divide their histories of publishing into before and after. Nicholson Baker, a man who knows the joys of obsessive research, has already started the division. “Let me tell you,” he says, “I remember the old days, the antegoogluvian era. It was O.K.—it wasn’t horrible by any means. There were cordless telephones, and people wore comfortable sweaters… . But the haul was haphazard, and it came in slow.”17 And the site that is often the first hit on Google is just as enthralling to Baker’s jackdaw consciousness:

  Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It’s fact-encirclingly huge, and it’s idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking, and full of simmering controversies—and it’s free, and it’s fast. In a few seconds you can look up, for instance, “Diogenes of Sinope,” or “turnip,” or “Crazy Eddie,” or ‘ “Bagoas,” or “quadratic formula,” or “Bristol Beaufighter,” or “squeegee,” or “Sanford B. Dole,” and you’ll have knowledge you didn’t have before. It’s like some vast aerial city with people walking briskly to and fro on catwalks, carrying picnic baskets full of nutritious snacks.18

  There is much to love about Google, Wikipedia, and other online reference sources. Encyclopedias and unabridged dictionaries are hard to tote around; computers can be small, and phones fit in a pocket. Reference books need constant updating, which pushes old editions into landfills; online sources can be revised several times a day without any additional cost or waste. Information is now more timely than it has ever been: by the time the news announces the death of a prominent person, the relevant Wikipedia page has been updated.

  And yet Google and Wikipedia have serious limitations. Wikipedia, for instance, shows a strong presentist bias: the first George to serve as president of the United States, Washington, has a Wikipedia entry of roughly 19,000 words; the most recent President George, this time W. Bush, gets 27,000. Wikipedia also famously favors the fashionable. The English-language entry for Zoroaster—the prophet who developed the world’s first monotheistic religion—gets fewer than 8,000 words, and the religion he founded another 9,000; combined, the two entries are the length of Lady Gaga’s entry. Thomas Aquinas weighs in at just over 37,000 words on his life and major works; Michael Jackson warrants five times the space. The notorious and infamous do well: the account of O. J. Simpson’s life and criminal trials occupies nearly 21,000 words, more than the entries for Florence Nightingale and Mother Teresa combined. Popular culture tends to fare much better than high culture. Perhaps we should expect the pages on the Legend of Zelda video games to get more space in Wikipedia than Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but those pages, at more than 160,000 words, are more than four times the length of Hamlet itself.

  Anxiety about reliability may be the greatest problem with these online resources. Google serves up “hits” without regard for the authority of the source; Wikipedia is assembled by uncredentialed volunteers. As a result, some teachers forbid reference to them. Middlebury College’s history department, for instance, voted to ban citat
ions of websites in student papers.19 That is almost certainly an overreaction, not least because some online resources are every bit as thoroughly vetted as print resources, and some are just scanned versions of authoritative print encyclopedias. Even Wikipedia, for all its lapses, is valuable. Physicist Freeman Dyson captures the paradox well: “Among my friends and acquaintances, everybody distrusts Wikipedia and everybody uses it.”20 I confess that, even though I adore dusty dictionaries and surround myself with them, I wrote hardly a page of this book without turning to Google, Wikipedia, or both. But these free online sources need to get more reliable, and, just as important, users need to become more sophisticated in evaluating the sources they use.

  The bigger danger, to my mind, is that Wikipedia, despite being noncommercial, still poses many of the dangers of a traditional monopoly, and we run the risk of living in an information monoculture. We are in a strange position in the second decade of the third millennium. More information is more readily available to more people than at any time in human history—not merely an incremental increase on previous ages, but an exponential explosion. A rural twelve-year-old with a $250 laptop and a slow Internet connection now has access to more information than the wealthiest scholars and librarians at the richest universities just a generation ago, and anyone with a smartphone owns orders of magnitude more information than fit in the Library of Alexandria. But the new world order remains nervous-making. The information at our fingertips is more diverse than ever before, but in some ways it is more limited. Google has become the first—and, for many people, only—stop for seeking information on everything.