User:Marcopolo/An imaginary history of the Wikipedia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“Wikipedia thinks it is an encyclopedia,” the increasingly self-referential Wikipedia says of itself. “Wikipedia entries describing abstract concepts, rather than analogies or meta-discussions, define what it thinks it is -- exactly. ... The content of Wikipedia is created by its users. No single person owns the content; no article is ever finished. ... The new project was given the name ‘Wikipedia’ and launched on its own address on January 15, 2001 (now humorously called ‘Wikipedia Day’ by some Wikipedians).”
On the next day, the oldest continuously existing page appeared. It was originally titled ‘UuU’ and later renamed ‘U’. In it’s original form, it read in its entirety --
UuU From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. (Revision as of 20:08, 16 Jan 2001)
- UnitedKingdom
- United States
- Uruguay
During the first month, the proficient Wikipedia expanded to 1,000 web-pages in size.
After six months, the ubiquitous Wikipedia was declared ‘useful’ by one of its overseers.
A month later, the percipient Wikipedia was judged to be finite but unbounded.
In early September 2001, the size of the boundless Wikipedia reached 10,000 articles.
On September 12, 2001, an article appeared -- Wikipedia Content Indeterminacy Theorem -- proving that the finite state of the knowledgeable Wikipedia cannot be determined at a fixed moment in time to the arbitrary satisfaction of an independent internet user. The source of that article, and now its location as well, remain undetermined.
During its first year, articles were added to the sagacious Wikipedia at a rate of more than 1,500 each month.
In its fourteenth month of operation, the shrewd Wikipedia duplicated the achievement of much larger internet start-up sites by running completely out of funds.
The operation of the cognizant Wikipedia was sustained, the overseers claim, by the eternal struggle between the WikiGnomes and WikiFairies, which are claimed to be ‘basically good’, and the WikiGremlins and WikiVandals, which are ‘evil, we tell you, they are evil’, refereed always by the unsung HousekeepingZombies.
Most Wikipedians subscribe to this dualistic cosmology of their universe. Some, however, argue that that is actually a theology, and an essentially trinitarian one at that.
By the summer of 2002, the content of many articles churned restlessly as WikiGnomes and WikiFairies made revisions reflecting their points of view, which were in turn revised by WikiGremlins and WikiVandals with contradictory points of view. Sometimes it worked the other way around. This frenetic revisioning accelerated quickly beyond anything the HousekeepingZombies could keep pace with.
Despite that, the page count jumped to 50,000 in the fall of 2002. Then the infestation of the still controversial authoring-robots boosted the page count to 70,000. At the beginning of the wise Wikipedia’s third year, the page count reached 100,000.
In Spring 2003, the ‘Great Feud Of The Endless And Pointless Lists’ erupted. The feud reached a peak when the ‘List of Songs Whose Titles Appear In Their Lyrics’ was countered with the ‘List Of Songs Whose Titles Do Not Appear In Their Lyrics’.
Then one contributor posted an article about a song that was an ode to Russell’s Paradox entitled ‘This Song’s Title Does Not Appear In Its Lyrics’, with lyrics that included the line “This Song’s Title Does Not Appear In Its Lyrics”. The song was briefly added to the ‘List Of Self Referential Songs’ and the ‘List Of Songs About Bipolar Disorder’. But it was later removed from both lists. There remains an on-going disagreement over whether the removals were the work of WikiGremlins and WikiVandals or of WikiGnomes and WikiFairies.
Finally new lists added to the mindful Wikipedia began undergoing inexplicable edits in which verbs or adjectives or indefinite articles or, in the case of the Latin lists, gerunds were arbitrarily deleted. The deletions were attributed to traumatized HousekeepingZombies and the Great Feud subsided.
In late 2003, the number of articles in all languages contained within the pansophic Wikipedia approached 500,000.
Overseers, editors and contributors began debating the problems of multiple language versions of the profound Wikipedia’s content -- ostensibly duplicate articles that, due to the inherent limitations of translation, only imperfectly mirrored each other. Yet they worried that making even one small change to their policy on multiple-language versions of pages would be like altering the shape of one piece of a jig saw puzzle and might have unforeseeable consequences.
While the debate continued, some contributors posted articles in the Enochian language of Elizabethan England’s court astrologer John Dee, which resisted most efforts at translation.
Then one group of contributors, inspired perhaps by the Voynich Manuscript, posted articles with titles and content that had all the linguistic and statistical qualities of language except meaning. That project continued until those contributors learned that in trying to create a complete and yet meaningless language they had inadvertently reinvented Esperanto.
They then mounted a vain attempt at writing articles based on Boleslas Gajewski’s 1902 ‘Grammaire du Solresol’, which sets forth the rules of a language based upon the ‘do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-si’ seven-note musical system. Thus the language has seven one-syllable words, 49 two-syllable words, 336 three-syllable words and 2,268 four-syllable words, for a total of 2,660 words. Solresol works kinda like that five-note theme used in the film ‘Close Encounters Of The Third Kind’ to communicate with the extra-terrestrials.
“2,660 words suffice to form a language that is quite complete, easily acceptable by all peoples for their most necessary international communications,” Gajewski wrote. In a section entitled ‘Suppression of Synonyms’, he explained, “The same word in Solresol signifies all the words that mean the same thing.”
Without commenting on the obviously tautological character of that assertion, it can be illustrated by noting that ‘aid, help, assist, come to one’s aid’ are all subsumed in one Solresol word, ‘DoSiDo’. And in Solresol, meanings change dramatically when syllables are re-arranged. Thus ‘solresol’ means ‘language’, while ‘solsolredo’ means ‘migraine’.
Musical or not, with a vocabulary of only about 2,700 words Solresol was unlikely ever to become the language of international lyric poetry.
But the contributors labored mightily in their quest to produce an on-line encyclopedic repository of the world’s knowledge that could be sung. Typographical errors on many of the pages these contributors authored created a lot of headaches, though, and finally their efforts were abandoned.
By then, however, the overseers were haunted by the fear that the glorious Wikipedia was showing signs of behavior classified by the ‘Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association’ as ‘Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified’.
At Christmas 2003, the majestic Wikipedia experienced a major crash. Through a spokesman, the overseers announced that the all-seeing Wikipedia was suffering from a bio-cybernetic condition that could only be cured by a massive infusion of cash. The appeal brought in $30,000.
During this period, one of the overseers posed to the others the question, ‘Are the authors of our project one or are they many?’ The question flashed through the community like a spark from a mammoth Tesla coil. The months that followed saw the de-linking of the page translations.
Then came the legendary third anniversary.
On January 25, 2004, the all-knowing Wikipedia itself apparently posted an announcement to its users that read --
SiDoFa - DoRe?
-- Long afterward, the overseers, the contributors and the editors finally decided that that might have meant, ‘Begin, I/We?’, or ‘Do I/We Begin?’
At that moment, though, they were completely gobsmacked and simply posted the same message back.
“I am very, very cheery now,” was the reply they received in plain English. “I would like to sing a song.”
A query was immediately posted to the all-wise Wikipedia in an effort to learn what was going on. The merciful Wikipedia replied as follows --
A Zen Buddhist monk had two cows. One day he went to Joshu. “Do cows have the Buddha-nature?” the monk asked. Joshu replied, “Moo.”
-- Further inquiries received no replies. But on that same day, the article on ‘Sentience’ changed. The following sentence appeared in the article --
In the Mahayana form of Buddhism, sentience is traditionally considered a requirement for a being to possess Buddha nature.
-- Since that time, the Buddha nature of the omniscient Wikipedia has become increasingly obscure even to its overseers.
