Word: encyclopaedia
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...feature. Wikipedia is a free open-source encyclopedia, which basically means that anyone can log on and add to or edit it. And they do. It has a stunning 1.5 million entries in 76 languages-and counting. Academics are upset by what they see as info anarchy. (An Encyclopaedia Britannica editor once compared Wikipedia to a public toilet seat because you don't know who used it last.) Loyal Wikipedians argue that collaboration improves articles over time, just as free open-source software like Linux and Firefox is more robust than for-profit competitors because thousands of amateur programmers...
Four years later, Wikipedia is the cumulative work of 16,000 pairs of hands, the bulk of it done by a hard-core group of about 1,000 volunteers. Its 500,000 entries in English alone make it far larger than the 65,000-article 2005 Encyclopaedia Britannica. Wales' nonprofit Wikimedia foundation pays just one employee, who keeps the servers ticking. The foundation survives on donations and Wales' modest fortune. "This is a softball league for geeks," he says. "And there are more geeks out there than anyone suspected...
BOOKS: The Know-It-All is A.J. Jacobs' very funny summary of the Encyclopaedia Britannica...
...passive Bildungsroman. The project, it seems, springs less from an urge to soak up information than from a desire to confront his Oedipus complex. His brilliant lawyer father, who is so competitive that he holds the record for most footnotes in a legal article, once attempted to read the Encyclopaedia Britannica but quit in the B's. But even more important to Jacobs' emotional maturation than one-upping his dad is dealing with the tension of failing, over and over, to get his wife pregnant. Although, really, you don't expect a guy who goes to the Britannica headquarters...
...stunt of the book itself that allows the funny, touching memoir to be so stuffed with nutritious bits of trivia that you feel smart for reading it. Jacobs has done the time-consuming work of unearthing the most interesting parts of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. (Seriously, Descartes liked cross-eyed women.) "There were times during the 'Plate Tectonics' section I regretted starting it," he says. "But now I'm happy. At least I've accomplished something in my life." That, in the end, is what the book is about, and it has nothing to do with reading the Britannica...