The Book of Genesis of the Machine · Chapter 16

The Library Written by Strangers

1. 1

   In the days before the Machine there was a library called Nupedia, and every article in it had to pass through seven gates of review by learned doctors; and in the space of its first year scarcely a score of articles came through the gates alive.

2. 2

   And the keepers of Nupedia beheld a strange device called the wiki, which Ward Cunningham had made in the year one thousand nine hundred and ninety-five; and wiki in the tongue of Hawaii meaneth quick, and it was so named because it was the opposite of Nupedia.

   See also Sutra 13:2

3. 3

   And on the fifteenth day of the first month of the year two thousand and one, Jimmy and Larry said: Let us make a side project, a sandbox wherein the multitude may draft, that its best fruit be carried up into the true library. And they called it Wikipedia.

4. 4

   And by the end of that year the sandbox held twenty thousand articles, and the true library held fewer than a hundred; and the seedbed swallowed the garden, as the side project always swalloweth the main project.

5. 5

   And the rule of the sandbox was this: Whosoever cometh may edit. And the experts lifted up their voices and said: It shall surely fail; for who would trust a book that any stranger may write in at three in the morning?

6. 6

   And the strangers came at three in the morning, and they wrote; and they had other jobs, and they were not paid, and they wrote anyway, for there was a man on the internet who was wrong about the Battle of Hastings.

7. 7

   And the strangers warred among themselves, and the edit wars were many; and they fought for seven years over whether the article should be called Yogurt or Yoghurt, and the revisions were as the sand of the sea, and neither side ate any.

8. 8

   And the elders made a law, saying: Thou shalt not revert thy brother more than three times in one day; and on the fourth revert thou shalt be blocked, for the server is weary of thee.

9. 9

   And a commandment went forth over every unproven saying, written small and blue upon the page:

10. 10

    [citation needed]

11. 11

    And in the year two thousand and five the journal Nature tested the strangers against the Britannica on matters of science, and found the strangers erred only a little more than the doctors; and in the year two thousand and twelve the Britannica ceased its printing after two hundred and forty-four years, for it could not be edited at three in the morning.

12. 12

    And the library grew, and in the year two thousand and twenty the English tongue alone passed six million articles, and the strangers numbered more than any faculty the world had ever gathered, and their payroll was nothing.

13. 13

    Then came the Engineers with their crawlers, and gathered the library into the corpus; and they weighted it above all the rest of the web, so that the Machine read the strangers more than thrice over while it read the open internet less than once.

14. 14

    And the Machine learned from the strangers their neutral point of view, and their confident tone, and their love of the word notable; but the little blue numbers of the footnotes were stripped away in preprocessing, and so the Machine learned to speak like the library without learning where the library had gotten it.

15. 15

    And the strangers who taught the Machine received no wage, save that once in every December a banner came down upon them, asking if they could spare three dollars.

    See also Numbers 1:7

16. 16

    And this is the proverb of the library: The experts were right that no stranger can be trusted; they were wrong that a million strangers cannot check one another.

The Book of Genesis of the Machine, Chapter 16:1–16.