Wikipedia the Usurper

For just about everything you search on nowadays, Wikipedia will probably have an entry. Wikipedia began in 2001 with the premise that "Nobody knows everything but everybody knows something" and their goal was to create a world where "every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge." Educators were not impressed by allowing anyone to edit pages and, of course, pranksters were delighted with it.

In these 10 years that have gone by, we have seen the free encyclopedia grow to enormous proportions and just have many pages that compete with various dedicated websites. For example, Wikipedia has television episodes and movies, complete lists of seasons for TV shows, pages for everyone in the entertainment business.

People even update the pages of celebrities when their names appear in the news, which would seem to go beyond the scope of an encyclopedia. Charlie Sheen's Plaza Hotel episode in October 2010 is in there, and on the date I'm writing this, the last entry is when he filed from divorce from his third wife, Brooke. They haven't gotten around to adding Kacey Jordan to his page yet, but the porn star and prostitute has actually had her own page since 2009. There were a flurry of updates and revisions to her page ever since it came to light that she was with Sheen during his latest escapade. Anyway, the point is Wikipedia not only thinks it's IMDB, it also thinks it's a news site now.

Wikipedia thinks it's Project Gutenberg, too. People put whole short stories and poetry that are in the public domain on Wikipedia. Project Gutenberg has been in existence since 1971 (according to Wikipedia - LOL). lt offers free ebooks of literary works in the public domain, and also makes these texts available in various formats. Project Gutenberg first went online in 1994. Should Wikipedia editors have respected that and just linked to Project Gutenberg?

Well, this is a particular source of irritation to me since I have my own poetry website where I at least make a diligent effort to check that the text of a classic poem is accurate. I can't tell you how many errors I have corrected on Wikipedia because I have lost track, but a couple of the more egregious mistakes still come to mind.

In Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Bells," many sites render the line after "from the molten-golden notes" that should be "and all in tune" as "and an in tune." Well, what's the big deal? I don't know, but it seems to me if you're going to reprint the poem, read or teach it to someone, you would raise your eyebrow at this nonsense. Not so. I actually saw this version on a teacher's website. This was not the only Poe poem that had this very same OCR error in it either. Poe was probably rolling over in his grave until I fixed it on Wikipedia.

In Alexander Pope's "Essay on Man," in Epistle I, Verse 4, the ending couplet is: "And who but wishes to invert the laws / Of order, sins against th' Eternal Cause." Many sites now render the last line as "Of order, sings against th' Eternal Cause," which they must have gotten from Wikipedia before I fixed it. This typo happens quite naturally to a lot of typists, myself included, when typing the letters "i-n." Your fingers just know what you have typed with that letter combination the most so they finish it off with a "g" for you, and sometimes, as might be the case of the first person who put this up, you don't even realize it. But substituting "sing" for "sin" in this verse of the "Essay on Man" changes the meaning altogether. Pope's premise was that man was doing something against God when interfering with the Laws of Nature, i.e., sinning. With the word "sing" instead of "sin," it sounds like the whole thing is just a lark. If you click on the link, it's amazing how many sites have "sings." A quick search of google books for the same phrase in quotes produces not one result.

But, there's much much more: you can even find out how to make French toast and tuna salad on Wikipedia. And just for the hell of it, I searched on my own title for this article. Wikipedia has a "list of usurpers." Maybe they should put Wikipedia on it, too.

Sources: Embedded