It’s good to be reminded that collaborative concepts like Wikipedia are nothing new. I just saw the paperback version of Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman. This tells the story of how the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary put out a call during the late 19th century pleading for “men of letters” to provide help with their mammoth undertaking. They used the Internet of their day, the Postal Service, to get hundreds of responses. The book explains how one contributor Dr. W.C. Minor, provided literally thousands of entries to the editors. However Minor, an American expatriate in England and a Civil War veteran, was actually a certified lunatic who turned in his dictionary entries from the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Some of the Wikipedia entries probably come from similar sources. Powered By Qumana
