Tiger-in-the-world

It turns out that Wikipedia really does know everything: take a look at the caption/description on this photo. Well, almost everything: take a look at the publish date. Not quite timely enough, Wikipedians.

(Refresh your memory of Sun-Drunken's longest-running joke, dating back to the beginning of October 2005. Not quite timely enough.)

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This is a one-line joke, as it's meant to be, but the truth is I was a little impressed when I by accident stumbled on this.

(Seriously serendipitous accident: I was trying to fill out my state income tax return, which asks in part what municipality I'm in, and I couldn't find out whether I'm in Princeton Borough or Princeton Township. It's not as easy as you'd think: compare, if you feel strong enough to enter the bureaucracy, the bottom-left quadrant of this Borough map with my location on this Princeton University map -- select "Graduate College" from the dropdown. I think I cross municipality lines when I go to my bookshelf from my desk. Apparently the municipalities split more than a century ago, over a school board dispute, and two subsequent referenda to recombine them have failed. Alas, I don't get a vote.)

My native caution once led me to be suspicious of Wikipedia, but judging by how often I've linked to its entries from these pages you can tell my thinking has evolved. At first it was just the convenience and the breadth. Many of the math articles even seemed good. Over time the general quality seems to have jumped, and there appears to be a large collection of people working on scores of "Wikiprojects" to put the face of professionalism all over the site.

In the end it was the romance of the encyclopedia that converted me: the quest to summarise all human knowledge. A link to the Foundation article might be appropriate, but still more apt would be one to the Encyclopedia Britannica Eleventh Edition article. (Irony?). And if I went to fiction, I'd be more apt to link to this bio of Cordwainer Smith, whose book reminds me that while happiness is man's ultimate good, as Aristotle tells us, there is still a little more we'd wish for when we write the history of mankind.