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Being the founder of the Internet's largest encyclopedia means Jimmy Wales gets a lot of bizarre e-mail. There are the correspondents who assume he wrote Wikipedia himself and is therefore an expert on everything-like the guy who found vials of mercury in his late grandfather's attic and wanted Wales, a former options trader, to tell him what to do with them. There are kooks who claim to have found, say, a 9,000-year-old, 15-ft.-tall human skeleton and wonder whether Wales would be interested. But the e-mails that make him laugh...
...techie saying goes, it's not a bug, it's a 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...
...futures trading, which Wales did in Chicago for much of the 1990s, was "fun and cool." Quitting his job and moving to San Diego to start an Internet company? Delightful. Paying the mortgage purely from investments, even to this day? Fantastic. Spending two years trying to start an online encyclopedia called Nupedia yet getting no further than the first 12 articles? Not a lot of fun, actually...
...returned to obscurity” as Grynbaum erroneously asserted. Norwood is the author of three critically-acclaimed books on American history (one of which won the Herbert G. Gutman Award in American Social History) and numerous scholarly articles, and he is co-editor of the prestigious Encyclopedia of American Jewish History. During the three months following the conference, when Grynbaum seems to think that nothing further happened on this issue, Prof. Norwood was completing a major scholarly essay on Harvard’s relationship with the Nazis, which will be published shortly by American Jewish History, the leading scholarly journal...
...Appreciation A common phrase heard around TIME's editorial offices in London, especially late on Saturday nights when we were frantically trying to close the magazine, was: "Ask Penny." Penny Campbell, who died unexpectedly last month, was our very own walking encyclopedia. Whatever information you needed-whether it was pointers on an arcane aspect of TIME style, the current status of some attempted coup or the latest piece of office news-Penny knew. And she would happily tell you, too, over a steaming cup of organic Earl Grey tea and a chocolate biscuit...