kip/bot/blog

A little late to be posting this, but the Nicholson Baker piece on Wikipedia in the NY Review of Books is pretty interesting for its insights, what it says about the NYRB, and for the author.

First, the author. Nicholson Baker is a fascinating person, and an interesting choice for the NYRB piece. In the past he has:

• campaigned against libraries destroying books and card catalogs
• saved the Rochester Public Library Card catalog from destruction
• wrote an article about the books that appear as props in IKEA rooms after having read a large volume of them
• worte a lengthy but illuminating New Yorker about how he organizes the 6 * 6 bookshelves that he limits his book collection to at home
• unrelated, but interesting, he wrote an intimate confessional about his obsession with John Updike (U and I), in which he tortures himself by comparing his prose to Updike’s, obsesses about why Updike plays golf with some writers but not him, tries to remember his favorite passages from Updike’s work, only to be frustrated at the inaccuracy

There’s an obsessive self-reflectiveness to Baker which, coupled with his openness and honesty, makes him an ideal writer about user-generated content. The piece itself is ostensibly a review of Missing Manual for Wikipedia, by “cheery electronics expert David Pogue.” It’s a charming conceit of NYRB to throw a single title into the mix, force the writer to make a few comments about it, and then let them get on with the business of commentary.
Baker is the perfect blend of NYRB snob, but one who not only gets the internet, but gets into it. He’s not slumming, and he’s got enough literary juice and openness to unabashedly enjoy Wikipedia:

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.

He also looks at it as a literary/writing phenomenon, and manages to keep some level of snobby, bookish aloofness:

[Wikipedia] asked for help, and when it did, it used a particularly affecting word: “stub.” At the bottom of a short article about something, it would say, “This article about X is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.” And you’d think: That poor sad stub: I will help. Not right now, because I’m writing a book, but someday, yes, I will try to help.

And when people did help they were given a flattering name. They weren’t called “Wikipedia’s little helpers,” they were called “editors.” It was like a giant community leaf-raking project in which everyone was called a groundskeeper.

Despite the de rigeur snobbery in the preamble, Baker is genuinely enthusiastic about Wikipedia. In fact, Baker goes almost completely native in its culture. Not surprisingly, Baker, the man who preserved Ikea display books from obscurity (however briefly) and books and card catalogs from the shredder, became an active protector of articles slated for deletion. He put hours of time into making the case that an obscure beat personality, the Jitterbug telephone, unknown Russian poets, and the author of a ‘naps will change your life book’ deserved an entry in Wikipedia if someone was willing to write one. He followed them with the petty but real passions we’ve all experienced in bulletin boards, usenet groups, or any kind of forum that we know takes up too much headspace, but we allow it to anyway.

I stopped hearing what my family was saying to me—for about two weeks I all but disappeared into my screen, trying to salvage brief, sometimes overly promotional but nevertheless worthy biographies by recasting them in neutral language, and by hastily scouring newspaper databases and Google Books for references that would bulk up their notability quotient. I had become an “inclusionist.”

Baker is good-natured about his emotional attachment to these struggles: “When I managed to help save something I was quietly thrilled — I walked tall, like Henry Fonda in Twelve Angry Men.” He also observes that:

All big internet successes have a more or less addictive component — they hook you because they are solitary ways to be social: you keep checking in, peeking in, as you would to some noisy party going on downstairs in a house while you’re trying to sleep.

Not sure that all big internet successes rely on that hook, but he does highlight a powerful dynamic around safe ways to put one’s self out there, and his willingness to look at user-generation dynamics without condescension, especially a user-generated encyclopedia!, is refreshing as well as interesting.

The article has some nice higlights and Wiki-historical bits as well. He references over a dozen wars, vandalisms, deletions, hot-button entries. For my part, I did not know that Wikipedia was seeded with public domain content: the Encyclopedia Britannica 1911 edition, Dictoiary of Greek and Roman biography, two biography dictionaries, and a bible dictionary. Clever that.
Oh yeah, I think he recommends the Missing Manual: “this manual is enlightening, well organized, and full of good sense.”