Wiki Quickie

It was epiphanous for me to learn that the “wiki” in Wikipedia is Hawaiian for “quick”. Quick Wisdom? Talk about oxymoronic. Or just plain moronic! In any case, it is long, long way from the slowly professional aspirations of our Ur-encyclopedist, Denis Diderot (1713-1784). The Greek-derived term itself, interestingly, means “general education”, from “enkyklios” (general) and “paideia” (child-rearing)!

In our bleary new universe of bloggishness, “wiki” could become a fast track to mass foolishness. And in a college culture where on-line plagiarism has become endemic, it is an invitation to mass idiocy. The blind shall copy the blind. This is what the innocent Wiki’s call a stub! There is more danger ahead, much more.

It is a sign of our confusable times, that the Middlebury College (Vermont) History Department just laid down a timely ukase.: Thou shalt not cite Wikipedia in your term papers or reports. Hmm. Last week was the centennial of W.H.Auden’s birthday: The Auden Society used this solemn occasion to announce that Wiki was clean on Wystan Hugh. Is this the pattern of our on-line future: on the one hand, NON IMPRIMATUR’s from professors tired of regurgitated “truthies” by hip college students who have more important things to do than seeking out legitimate secondary and primary materials on their own; and on the other, reputable scholarly societies giving the Wiki a quickie NIHIL OBSTAT’s. I thought in light of these countervailing impasses, it would be interesting to see how Denis Did (erot) it back in that First Western Enlightenment.

At hand, in a most timely fashion, on the new book rack of the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek, as I was Wiki-mulling was University of Rochester professor Dorinda Outram’s “Panorama of the Enlightenment” (Thames § Hudson, 2006). There I find Voltaire writing his friend Vermes: “I write in order to act”. That’s also what Diderot and his co-editor D’Alembert also had in mind: Their monumental undertaking was not simply for recreation or reference: They wanted their readers to use it to change the world. Between 1751 and 1765 they published seventeen volumes containing 71,818 articles and 2,885 engravings!

But not everyone greeted this intellectual energy with aplomb. In 1752 the Paris theology faculty, the Sorbonne, condemned the first two volumes to be publicly burnt. It took some intense lobbying with the Royal Court, the Catholic Church, and the book censors to restore their publishing license. The Ancien Regime were not encyclopedic fans! Malesherbes led a liberal Court Faction that cleared the ways for volumes 3 to 7 to be published between 1753 and 1757. Pope Clement XIII cracked his pastoral whip in 1759 and publication again ceased. D’Alembert had had enough and quite the editorial team, taking several others with him. Diderot published volumes 8 to 17 on his own hook. He remained in sole charge until 1772. He died in 1784.

Incidentally, their first ambition was to translate Ephraim Chambers’ “Cyclopedia” into French. In an explanatory essay,”Encyclopedie”, Diderot asserted that there was too much to say nowadays, for a single writer to cover all the topics. Therefore they needed a team of writers (Hello, bloggers of the world, Unite!) to quickly assemble pertinent material “bound together only by the general interest of humanity, and the sense of mutual good-will.” Oh yeah.

I am increasingly bothered by the snarling I find on the web: talk radio trasherie. When, for example, my beloved journalist Molly Ivins died at 62 of breast cancer, I sieved my favorite sites for comfort. SLATE astonished me with “FRAY” blogs gratuitously cruel and illiterate! Are we entering an Era of Unenlightenment? Ignoramuses get off on setting their own sinking standards of civility.

Contrast with Diderot’s agenda: “. . . to assemble knowledge scattered across the earth, to reveal its overall structure to our contemporaries, and to pass it on to those who will come after us; so that the achievements of past ages do not become worthless for the centuries to come, so that our descendants, in becoming better informed, may at the same time become more virtuous and content, and so that we do not leave this earth without having earned the respect of the human race.” YO, Denis!

And to make its compilations more effective, they invented the strategy of cross referencing and used many plates to give greater access to their readers. No wonder more than 4000 buyers were willing to pay 874 livres (about twice the annual wage of a skilled worker) for the set. The high price excluded most workers and many middle class readers. So the first impact was confined to the richer aristocracy, the higher clergy, senior bureaucrats and successful doctors and lawyers. Probably even the writers of the articles couldn’t afford the seventeen volumes. It wasn’t until the 1770’s that cheaper editions (384, then 223 livres) allowed the middle classes to join the readership. By 1780, a solid 24,000 copies were circulating in Europe.

Oddly, different European countries experienced its liberating effects at widely different levels. Partly that was economic, partly religious. “A thread that runs right through all the articles dealing with theological matters is an outright attack on the Catholic Church, which the encyclopedistes saw as nothing more than a priestly fraud, a set of superstitions designed to make the poor patiently endure the misery of their lot on earth in return for the promise of a future reward in heaven.” (Outram, p.51.)

It is amazing to me to see the Islamist/secularism flap which poisons our contemporary discourse prefigured in eighteenth century Europe. Wiki is not the first wickedess in public discourse! But whether we’re in the History Department of Middlebury College or a poetry claque guarding the Rep of their hero, we need to monitor the shaggy output of our newest media.