Posted on 12/09/2001 8:35:24 PM PST by summer
December 9, 2001
INTRODUCTION
The Year in Ideas
When looking back at the end of a year, we usually regard the 12 months that have just passed as a series of momentous events, a parade of notable individuals or a gallery of compelling images. But these are not the only ways to capture the arc and rhythm of a year. For this special issue, The Times Magazine has chosen a different lens: ideas. Presenting 2001 as the latest volume in the encyclopedia of human innovation, ''The Year in Ideas'' offers not a summary of the year's major news stories but a catalog of 80 notions, inventions, conceptual swerves and philosophical leaps that mattered this year and may well continue to matter in years to come.
Of course, not every idea that makes its mark on a culture is necessarily a big one or a good one. (Remember supply-side economics? New Coke?) Certainly, 2001 is no different. It was a year that was marked both by advancements and by backward thinking, by major breakthroughs and by ephemeral obsessions. Our catalog trys to capture this variety. Frivolous ideas are given the same prominence as weighty ones; the diabolical sits side by side with the noble.
In its attempt to chronicle our pell-mell culture in all its guises, this encyclopedia is far less august than its leather-bound forebears. (Thanks to some outlandish headline contortions, however, it is as alphabetically comprehensive as any Britannica.) The intention here was not to be authoritative; it was to recapture the childhood delight of paging through a World Book for the first time. Indeed, if you feel that some of the year's important ideas are missing from this catalog, you are probably right. At the same time, we would be surprised if you didn't encounter for the first time at least a dozen intriguing new ones.
Such a playful approach may seem like a strange way to document a year that has witnessed so much tragedy. Yet the grim events of this fall should not overshadow the many ways the human mind keeps pushing our world in bold new directions. A few years ago, at the height of the Internet boom, it became commonplace in Silicon Valley to believe that a single great idea could change the world. Even though our world has hardly turned out to be as utopian as those thinkers imagined, the Net prophets were definitely on to something. For ideas - big and small, good and evil - are the engines of history. They inspire progress and they justify cruel regimes. A new idea that permeates the culture can quicken the pulse of our daily lives; it can also bring that culture to a standstill. Indeed, a quick flip through this encyclopedia, we think, will make the case that 2001 was, for better or worse, a year bursting with ideas - from noble to vulgar, from crucial to trivial, from A to Z.
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IDEA:
Populist Editing
By STEVEN JOHNSON
Despite the popular conception of the Internet as our most interactive medium, on the great majority of Web pages the interaction all goes in one direction. But an intriguing new subgenre of sites, called WikiWikiWebs, really are interactive: users can both read and write. If you don't like the perspective of the article you are perusing, you can go in and rephrase the concluding paragraph. If you stumble across a spelling mistake, you can fix it with a few quick keystrokes. Wikis are like communal gardens of data: some participants do a lot of heavy planting, while others prefer to pull a weed here and there.
The most ambitious Wiki project to date applies this governing principle to the encyclopedia, that Enlightenment-era icon of human intelligence. The result is the Wikipedia, created in early 2001 by a philosophy Ph.D. named Larry Sanger and billed as ''a collaborative project to produce a complete encyclopedia from scratch.'' Wikipedia has attracted more than 1,000 new entries a month on everything from astronomy to the visual arts. With a total of 16,000 articles in the database, the Wikipedia is already large enough to be a source of generally reliable information, though stronger in some areas (''Star Trek'' spinoffs) than others (the novels of Charles Dickens).
Wikipedia differs from conventional encyclopedias in that each article is a work in progress: a visitor will draft a new entry, sometimes merely jotting down a few random data points, with a handful of links to other related entries; a few weeks later, another visitor might add a paragraph or two or a few more hyperlinks. Each entry has a revision history, like those featured in modern word processors, that lets you see at a glance any changes that have been made to the document.
What prevents a crank or a saboteur from deliberately undermining the quality of entries? Only the steady force of constant revisions, doled out by thousands of contributors. A few jokers in the mix will invariably get washed out by the overwhelming number of contributors who are genuinely interested in the site's meeting its objectives. There is a saying in the open-source software community (from which the Wiki movement borrows more than a few moves): given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. The slogan works for programmers collectively writing an operating system like Linux, so why shouldn't it work for hobbyists and armchair enthusiasts stringing together an encyclopedia?
...here: have an apple.
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