Information, Please!

the stack of twigs doing here? Jeez? Hello, good afternoon, ma'am. Have you ever wished you own the sum of human knowledge? The library that never closes? Oh? Are you have a library? This is a library. This is the last archive. Didn't you see the big breast sign outside? I don't get it. What are you selling anyway? Twenty nine volumes, twenty eight thousand, one hundred and fifty pages, forty four million words of text. When in doubt look it up. Oh okay, really sorry, thanks,

but it seems so cruel. But mister, I've already got one right here. I've had it for a very long time. Step across the threshold to my family's front door. In nineteen seventy two, the day of the Encyclopedia arrived, I was six up. Till then I had experienced only a few exciting deliveries. Remember there was no Amazon then. Not much got dropped off by truck, at least not at our house. Once we got a new refrigerator, a truck pulled up, two guys rolled it off on a little

rolling cart, wheeled it into our yellow kitchen. Mostly I remember using the cardboard box that the fridge had come in to build a fort That was pretty fantastic, But the Encyclopedia was even better than the fridge. My mother unpacked the volumes from brown boxes and lined them up on a shelf in the living room. Twenty two big, fat, important looking, very serious books that would look like leather binding, cream colored and gold leaf edged pages like a Bible,

color photographs, maps, and the thrill didn't end there. Every year would get another shipment updates. You were supposed to go back into the original volumes and insert new pages. Sometimes the updates came with stickers they were supposed to place over the outdated information. I really didn't have a lot of books that Encyclopedia set really was the superstar

of our family library. I loved everything about it, the smell, the fanciness, the way they lined up like a regiment of soldiers, all there on a shelf in the living room, next to our stack of board games Monopoly, sorry, Clue. The encyclopedia. It was like this box with no bottom, endless knowledge. Encyclopedias for decades were sold one by one, door to door. Knowledge doesn't often travel in quite that

way anymore, hand selling a knock on the door. How did that start, how did it work, why did it end? It seemed important to understanding how we gain access to knowledge today. So I asked a world class expert, a wizard at the art of selling a walking library, and I would just knock on their door, and I'd have the little card with me and I'd say, Hi, this

is Myrin Taxman from Encyclopedia Britannica. You sent in for some information, and I was in the area here, so I thought I'd stop by and show you what we have. Myron Taxman started selling encyclopedias in Chicago in the nineteen sixties when he was twenty two. He's old encyclopedias for nearly thirty years in Florida. Now, I bet a lot of x Encyclopedia salesman lived there. But back in Chicago in his heyday, Taxman loved his work. He adored it,

Myron Taxman. He's like a character in a short story by John Updyke or maybe Kurt Vaughnegut, Except you cannot make this guy up. You know, if I had a call Sunday night, why not? So you go out for an hour and make as say, a taxman is so good at selling that after talking to him for a while, should confess that that's pretty sure. I'd buy just about anything from this guy. But you can't sell something you

don't believe him. And he believed in encyclopedias. He believed in bringing the sum of human knowledge to American households, door by door by door, we would bring out what we call the giant broadside. Well, the giant broadside was a life size picture of the whole full set of books. And you threw that out right in front of him, right under their feet, so they couldn't even move their feet. I picture the giant broadside is a folded up cardboard display,

oh the size of a dining room table. The Texan would unfold like an accordion and lay out on the floor like a magic carpet. And then the real was you brought out a nice leather bound, gold filled sample of Britannica, and then you've did a little presentation with that. You put it in their hands and so they could hold it and play with it. That feeling it made my mouth water just hearing Taxman talk about the feeling of holding that sum of human knowledge in your hand,

playing with it. I want that feeling back. Welcome to the third season of The Last Archive. The show about how we know what we know and why it seems lately is if we don't know anything at all. I'm Jill Lapoor. The first season of The Last Archive was a who Done It? Who Killed truth? I would back over the last century to look at forces that undermine people's ability to get the facts and to get to the bottom of things. The second season uncovered the history

of doubt, from rational skepticism to mindless conspiracy theories. I met frauds and hucksters and fakes people peddling nonsense. So for two seasons, the first two years of the Pandemic mind You, I told a lot of stories about the origins of a lot of problems that got to be a little depressing. This season is the antidote my survey

of solutions. This season is all about common knowledge, common in the sense of ordinary, ordinary knowledge held by ordinary people, ordinary things that people agree on, and common in the sense of communal shared held in community as a public good. Is that kind of knowledge still possible? Knowledge that we all have, knowledge that we all agree upon. That feeling of holding an encyclopedia in your hands, it's priceless. Encyclopedias are very old. They've been around for thousands of years.

For all but the last few centuries. They existed only in manuscript, copied by hand, and they were for scholars, a tiny number of philosophers. Encyclopedia Britannica had been first published in Scotland in seventeen sixty eight, a product of the Enlightenment, with its faith in education and reason and the diffusion of knowledge. I think of all the other projects that got started then, libraries, public schools, self government.

All these years later, it's still called Encyclopedia Britannica, but really it ought to be called Encyclopedia Americana. By the end of the nineteenth century. Most of its sales were coming from the United States, where striving self made Americans really loved its democratic ethos knowledge for all. Eventually the company itself moved to the US. It's one thing to compile knowledge, it's another to spread it. To take that knowledge stored up in universities and make it common, make

it ordinary. Britannica came up with a very American way of diffusing knowledge, peddling it house by house. This is the part that really fascinates me. Even before most Americans had telephones or electricity, you could get in a way hooked up to this huge network of information encyclopedia companies. Though they didn't invent this method of door to door sales, Bible salesman did. The Bible runs as level as we have three plans on it cash cod and also they

have a little Catholic on the plan. Which parent plan would be the best varu the ABSC. It was awfully easy for selling encyclopedias to fit right into this niche evangelical capitalism. In the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties, Britannica was owned by Sears Roebuck, the department store company, with a giant mail order catalog seers trained a salesforce that would grow to more than two thousand strong to sell

Encyclopedia's door to door. The house to house salesman symbolizes in a way the function evolve salesman, which is to bring good or servidus of the attention of the consumer and to help the consumer buy. Like Bible salesman, Britannica salesman work from scripts. Mostly they learned these scripts from each other and from the best salesman. There's no plays and gentleman to make sure things are rolling, will rolling. They learned those scripts from Myron Taxman. That's him in

an old Britannica training video. This is going to be air Advanced Door Approach clinic for people working leads to start out with giving the basic door approach, which is the company door approach. Is everybody here know the company door approach? I'm sure you do. Encyclopedia salesman, like Bible salesman, knocked on the doors of families. They've gotten leads on. A lead is the name or addresser phone number of someone who might likely buy the stuff you're selling. Bible

salesman got their leads from church attendance lists. Britannica generated its leads from places like newspaper contests. One place Britannica generated leads was from a radio quiz show. I mean, think about what better way to find nerds than to invite people to submit questions to a quiz show, Wake Up America trying to bombard the board of full experts with the toughest question who can think of? That show was called Information Please, and it was broadcast nationally from

nineteen thirty eight to nineteen fifty one. And if your question stumps are all of experts, you'll receive a complete twenty four volume set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The show's title information Please was a reference to what you'd say back in the day when you picked up the telephone and wanted information. You could ask the operator for someone's phone number, or the weather were the capital of Botswana? Who was a very old version of Siri, a secular oracle. Anyway,

Information please. The radio show it was a blast Na me I present our master of ceremonies, mister Clifton Clifton Fataman. The quiz show's host was the books editor of the New Yorker He was also on the board of Encyclopedia Britannica. Gentleman, we're all I'm beginning with the following creston, Where does this line occur? Hey, nonny nonny? Hey none in Shakespeare?

I suppose it weren't. Then I lose. The premise of the radio quiz show was if you submitted that question and no one on the panel answered it correctly, if you stumped the experts, you would get a free Encyclopedia Britannica. But there was also a sneaky thing going on, because if you submitted a question and it never even got asked, I'm pretty sure that what you got was that your name would be sent to Encyclopedia Britannica and would be given to one of its salesmen as a lead. He'd

be given to a salesman like Myron Taxman. Hi, Myron Taxman from Encyclopedia Britannica. Here's my business card. Someone in your family indicated an interest in our products, and I stopped by to go over that with you. May I step in, As I said, Myron Taxman was not your average salesman. He didn't just hook me, He hooked everybody. He was a star and Britannica knew it. That's why they used him to train other salesman. Myron Taxman is

a family man. He's on the go, Andie cares about other families like the hus and I want a lot of awards for top salesman for the month and this and that. So I didn't really have to fight for the leads. They wanted to give me the leads and give me as a misnomer because you had to buy these leads. So a lot of the leads were like ten dollars a lead. So who's getting paid for the leads? Britannica to help subsidize their advertising to make the leads. So then was it a little like Glengarry glen Ross,

like fighting over the good leads? If you don't know about it. Glengarry glen Ross is a play David Mant wrote about real estate salesman. He was later made into a movie starring a very young Alec Baldwin. Absolutely when I saw that, when I saw Glen glen Ross, I said, wow, this is us. The leads are weak leads A week? You a week? Okay, I'm guessing there was less swearing. Encyclopedia Britannica. But still a leads, a lead Taxman. He'd get the leads, buy the leads, and then he'd go out.

He still had to find a way to make it in the door though. In that training video he made he laid out some rules of the road. Number one, don't make the mistake of giving a price in the doorway. Don't do it. I'd rather walk away. Number two, don't make a one legged pitch. It's death in our business. Don't pitch. The wife would out the husband, or the husband would have the wife the full or the house

the better. Most of the selling happened, Taxman said when he first stepped through that doorway, across that threshold and gave the warm up. But it was good if you had the children there, because then you could get them involved and actually they would help with the sale. Generally speaking, it was the wife that wanted the books more than anyone, because she'd be the one that would have to schlept the kids to the library all the time. And she know, now I don't have to go to the library. I have,

you know, the encyclopedias here. When Taxman had gathered the whole family together, not just the husband and the wife, but the kids too. He'd tell everyone where to sit. He didn't like sitting on the couch. That was too comfy, too likely people would stop paying attention. The kitchen table was better. People were more alert, ready to do business. And then after we sat down, I would start really schmoozing with them. Oh, you have such a lovely house.

I was always a detective when I walked in the door, and I would look around to see if I saw a trophy at golf trophy or pictures that they had kids playing football, and that really, to me made the sale. There were years in the United States when encyclopedias sold like Honestly, you could sort of say they sold like encyclopedias, because that and not hotcakes, was the measure. Owning a Bible was a mark of faith, a testament. Owning a set of encyclopedias became a mark of aspiring to belong

to a community of knowledge, a democracy of knowledge. But by the end of the nineteen sixties, the door to door encyclopedia salesman had become a punchline. You can hear exactly how in this Monty Python sketch from nineteen sixty nine. I want to come in and steal a few things. Madam, Are you an incertelopedia salesman? No, madam, I'm a burglar burglar people, I think you're an incertetopedia salesman. Oh, I'm not open to all. Let me in. Please, I'll let

you in your solm me instetpedias. I won't. When i'm all, just come in Ransacklefla honestly probably shops none at all. All. Right, back in the US, it was getting to be no joke. Sales methods got so aggressive that in nineteen seventy two, the Federal Trade Commission intervened, ordering Britannica to stop deceptive and aggressive sales tactics. Taxman told me this wasn't really fair, that Britannica was being punished for the sneaky methods of

other companies. And I believed him, But then again, I am a sucker from iron Taxman, and so we are a lot of other people. After he'd got the family sitting down at that kitchen table, not the couch, after he'd done a schmoozing about their golf game, the kid's hockey team, after all the warming up was done, he'd begin to close in on the deal. When do you

know that you've you've got him? It's something you know, it's it's kind of an innate feeling when they start looking at one another and oh, what do you think hattie as looked very nice? And they'd write the check right there for the first installment fifty dollars to start. Then they'd have to pay monthly with interest. Predatory, yes, but still an encyclopedia isn't say, a stationary bicycle or some other useless thing you might get swindled into buying.

People who grew up with these books talk about how the encyclopedia changed their lives, like comedian Steve Harvey, Well, mommy, I finally got the money together help us to educate ourselves. They bought an encyclopedia set Britannica, and everything you wanted to know was in that encyclopedia. And that's all you can know. If you want to look up something about elephant, and they had two pages on elephants, that was what you knew about the elephant. Harvey's not the only one.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor had a thing for encyclopedias. She grew up in the Bronx Her parents had moved there from Puerto Rico after her father died when she was nine years years old. Her mother, Selena, who worked six days a week, saved up for Britannica the most beautiful thing in the laurel. Now the encyclopedius today are online.

They're not selling them as books anymore. And I actually know there's some value sometimes to online reading, and I kind of like you, but I love the encyclopedias and things that I could feel in my hands and turn the pages, so to Mayor says, Britannica more or less saved her life, opened the door to a world of knowledge.

Myron Taxman believed that same thing in my heart. I know anyone that would buy these books, even if it just melt, made them feel better that they had this beautiful set of books on the shelf, and that was one source you could go to that you could find out about everything and anything that happened in the world. Britannica really was a kind of common knowledge. Knock knock, it's a library. Tell me about caterpillars, capillaries, the Caspian Sea.

It's all there, established, verifiable, illustrated, a library that had taken years and years and thousands of people to create and produce. Look up influenza and you'll find reliable, accurate information. Think about how hard it is now to find reliable and accurate information on the Internet, or in the thousands of years before the encyclopedia. Think of all the rumors and exaggerations and ignorance and misunderstanding and misinformation that characterized

human communication across time and distance. I mean, Britannica was not a perfect solution by any means. For one thing, it wasn't free. Also, it wasn't public. Britannica commercialized and privatized a body of knowledge. Why bother to go to your local public library when you could own these books in your own home. Also, there was something missing. More on that after the break. My family never owned Encyclopedia Britannica. They're too expensive. We owned instead one of its many cheaper,

down market competitors, an encyclopedia set called World Book. My mother saved up for our World Book Encyclopedia set by collecting SNH Green stamps, those little coupons you got whenever you bought gas or groceries. They worked like cash. You could trade them in to buy stuff. Of course, you know that you can get everything from color television to motor boats with green stamps. But now, well, just look at this. You could buy Britannica with green stamps too,

but you needed a lot more stamps. Those World Book encyclopedias were about the nicest thing we owned, but my mother didn't trust us with them. They had to stay in the living room or on a special shelf. None of us kids was ever allowed to take them into our bedrooms. Our mother was worried we lose them, or I guess maybe tear them, or I don't know actually what you're so worried about out But you can hear any entries. How different World Book was from Britannica, who

was geared more towards kids than to college professors. Consider just for one example, Britannica's entry for the topic of needles. The raw material of needle manufacture consists of Sheffield crucible steel drawn down into wire of suitable gauge. World Book's entry,

written more for kids, starts this way. The next time you pick up a sewing needle, remember that this little piece of steel with a fine point at one end and an eye at the other has passed through the hands of seventy workmen and undergone twenty two processes in its Manufacture World book was smart to target kids. Britannica, with its lofty style and dense prose, was at risk of being left in the dust. But Britannica had a secret weapon for reaching kids. Britannica made educational films in

the nineties sixties. In nineteen seventies, Thomas G. Smith worked for Encyclopedia Britannica Films, which was really starting to take off. What happened was it In nineteen fifty seven Sputnik was launched, and America was very embarrassed and we felt we would had fallen far behind the Soviets. The day Soviet scientists jauntily drop kicked the first Sputnik around the world, the

average American was shocked, bewildered, and was entful. Sputnik is a product of higher education, of instructors who teach much of the physics and mathematics in high school that we teach in colleague. After Sputnik, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act. It wanted American children to catch up to close any knowledge gaps between the US and the Soviets. All of a sudden there was tons of money for

educational films. Thomas Smith again. Encyclopedia Britanica films, which are sort of been a small company, suddenly got this big surgeons. It could practically sell the films for nothing. I mean, the schools would just buy them and the photo government would paid for it. So suddenly they were producing a lot of films. It was kind of like the Myron Taxman pitch, but on a jumbo scale and fueled by the anxiety of the Cold War. Don't want your children

to fall behind. Don't just buy encyclopedias, fund the films. Our survival may depend on degrees and graduates. We are not now equipped to produce. Unlike written Encyclopedia entries, Britannica's films spoke to kids on a kid level. Smith was perfect for this job because he was learning to make films in real time as he went, and because he was young, not much older than his audience. When I

first began, I was very inexperienced. I was in my early twenties, and I grew with experience longer I was there, and then I joined them as a writer, and I wrote my first film for them, and they had nobody to produce it. So as I started working on and that was food from the Sun. With a special camera, we can see that this beansprout must push through the soil to grow. Smith shot part of the film in his basement. You don't learn all that much from these movies.

Nothing that would directly help you beat Soviet kids at math? Would you get? I think is a kind of curiosity about the world. How does that thing work? Why is it built that way? Where did this idea come from? A good teacher? Can you use a film to promote discussion? That's the way they should be used. And see the film, then you talk about the subject. At least that's what we hoped. I think there were some teachers would just run the film and go out and have a smoke.

I had those teachers. So you let me just say thank you to every teacher who showed me a film or a film strip while they went out for a smoke or a cup of coffee or any kind of a much deserved break. Sure, educational films can be dead boring, but sometimes that's reassuring. Sometimes the idea that hey, here is a caterpillar, and here is how it turns into a butterfly. It's good stuff to know, and good stuff for kids to know. Grown ups want them to know.

There's beauty in the ordinary. The films are different from an encyclopedia entry, no reading required. Also, they're not the sum of human knowledge. They're invitations to knowledge. There's something democratic about this move too. Not here's the gospel of all known things. But here's a way to think, here's how to consider, here's a way to do an experiment, here's how to inquire. Smith made Britannica films for more than a decade. One of his last is a film

about the Solar System. At this point he was a master of the form. Also maybe just a little bit ready to stretch it. This last film of his it was only seventeen minutes long, but it takes you on a tour of the Solar System through the black of space, past each planet, as if you were traveling in a spaceship. At night, the temperature becomes cold enough to make iron little as glass. In the black sky, we see the neighboring planet Venus. That film proved to be Smith's ticket

out of educational films. George Lucas Star Wars, George Lucas saw Smith's Solar System film and loved its special effects. Lucas hired him. Smith worked for years for Lucas's company, Industrial Light and Magic. He worked on Et and Poltergeist. On Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, He shrank the kids. We're all the size of buggers. So there it is your historical through line from Sputnik to Honey, I Shrunk

the Kids. During the time that Smith worked for Britannica Films, his special effects were part of a bigger initiative trying to keep Britannica up to date with the latest scientific discoveries. Britannica had been the leading encyclopedia company for centuries, but by the time Smith was making those films, a few problems had begun to crop up. Updating the encyclopedia had been a problem for a long time. Britannica had, in its earliest days, tried to publish new editions every few

decades or so, but that got harder and harder. The warrior always was that a new edition would be out of date by the time it was printed. It just took so long to produce. In nineteen thirty eight, Britannica had instituted a policy called continuous revision, that is, updating parts of the encyclopedia every year instead of issuing a holy new edition. In nineteen seventy, Warren Priests, Britannica's editor, said that the job had gotten pretty near impossible. It

wasn't the only problem. It wasn't just that the world was getting more complex. It was also that more voices were speaking out against the whole idea of the encyclopedia, objecting to the very enterprise of something like a one stop shop for all knowledge. Britannica's editor, though, waived that criticism aside, we are essentially a Western alow a world encyclopedia, essentially a Western encyclopedia. Britannica really was very Western. It wasn't the sum of all human knowledge. It dropped its

net only in one ocean of knowledge. Still, it kept trying to get bigger. In nineteen seventy four, Britannica issued the first new edition in over forty years, Britannica three twenty eight volumes, more than four thousand contributors for more than a hundred countries. Putting it together, it cost thirty two million dollars. It's the one Encyclopedia your kids won't

outgrow Neil Britannica three. One size fits all. Britannica three had been reorganized, was still limited, written mainly by white men and mainly about the Western world. But it was bigger, and it was new, and it generated tons of sales. Myron Taxman, Encyclopedia salesman, was thrilled, Oh that was unbelievable. Yeah, did that change your pa? Which did it bring a

new business? It brought in a tremendous amount of new business because even people that had the old set wanted to get the new set, just like you know, I have an old car, you want to get the new car. And yeah, that year we made a ton of money. Was a real easy sale. I mean that was like shooting ducks. And then somewhat abruptly, the duck shooting era came to an end. Personal computers have a lie and they're available now at best Buy. In nineteen ninety a

set of Encyclopedia Britannica cost about fifteen hundred dollars. For that money, you could just about buy a computer, which likely came with some kind of an encyclopedia as a CD ROM. I asked Myron what he'd say when people told him they didn't need an encyclopedia because they were getting a computer. You know, there's nothing like having a book in your hand, and that you could get the browsing factor when you're looking at something and find other topics.

And this was the beauty of it. But it started getting harder and harder. Between nineteen ninety and nineteen ninety four, encyclopedia sales fell by half. Even Britannica's TV ads featuring this super annoying teenager couldn't save the business. My folks make sure I get a good breakfast. They got me a computer, a video camera, a compact displayer. But the problem is, hardly any of this stuff can really help me with my school work. There is something you could

have which would help you a lot. It's the new Encyclopedia Britannica. Just call this toll free number and we'll send you this free booklet telling you everything you need to know about your key to the Information Aid. In nineteen ninety four, Britannic could finally put all its content on cd RAM, conceding to the Information age. But that cd RAM cost twelve hundred dollars. You could get Microsoft, cd ROM, Encyclopedia and Carter for a fraction of that knowledge.

It seemed was getting cheaper and cheaper, at least cheaper to buy. It wasn't get cheaper to produce. In nineteen ninety six, Britannica laid off its entire door to door salesforce. Taxman, who is undauntable, took it in stride, put me out of business. I had four kids, a couple in college. Taxman became an insurance broker, and after a while he retired and moved to Florida, enjoyed himself. Britannica for a

while anyway, kept on printing encyclopedias. But nineteen ninety six that was the start of the Internet, and on the Internet the sum of human knowledge would come knocking the library that never closes, a whole different kind of door to door public, free, democratic, inclusive, interactive, but also much more room for error and misinformation. Knowledge on the Internet could be faked. After the break will jump to hyperspace.

It was incredible, unbelievably, blindingly thrilling in the nineteen nineties to ponder all that the Internet could do might do link everything to everything else, hyperlink hyperspace, information moving at the speed of light, and it didn't take long for a few very clever people to figure out that you could use this thing, this worldwide Web, to create a bigger,

better encyclopedia for everyone. All that promise and excitement it led to a gazillion projects eager to add your expertise to an article on Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that's one of the world's most visited websites. Wikipedia is the one project that realized all that giddy early promise of the Internet. It's vast, it's open, it's free, and for

the most part, it's reliable. Anyone can write an article, anyone can edit it, and so long as a subject clear, there is a certain bar of notability, any person, place, thing, or phenomenon can get an entry. I looked up sewing needle on Wikipedia. The sewing needle used for hand sewing, is a long, slender tool with a pointed tip at one end and a hole or eye to hold the

sewing thread. This entry first appeared in two thousand and four and has been edited more than three hundred times by more than a hundred users, adding details and illustrations, repairing broken links, correcting facts. The next major breakthrough in needle making was the arrival of high quality steel making technology from China in the tenth century, principally in Spain, in the form of the Catalan furnace, which soon extended

to produce reasonably high quality steel in significant volumes. Wikipedia isn't just say Britannica online. Its history is totally different, and so is its relationship with the idea of the expert. The whole venture relies on a notion of community, a community of knowing. What's weird to me is that it came in a way how to the dice throwing role playing game Dungeons and Dragons. On the early Internet, you could play Dungeons and Dragons like adventure games together in

what were known as MUDs, multiple user dungeons. This will be lost on you if you've never played D and D. But there is just a D and D vibe about Wikipedia, there's no denying it. Jimmy Wales played a lot of these games when he was in graduate school. Wales got very interested in how people navigated around the Internet early on,

which were with these things called web directories. Think of it like picking up your phone and asking the operator information please, or like using the Yellow Pages, a telephone directory. In nineteen ninety nine, Wales started something called Newpedia and he hired a guy named Larry Sanger as his editor in chief. Sanger was finishing a PhD in philosophy. In its first year, nupedia posted about twenty articles, which is not a lot. That's because unfortunately their peer review process

took forever. Also, Sanger was Nupedia's only regular employee. Everyone else was part time or a volunteer. So then Sanger got the idea to use this pretty new thing, a wiki, which would allow editors to post changes directly. In two thousand and one, Wikipedia was born. But in the end it wasn't Sanger who became the face of this project. It was the guy who is still the face of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales. Here he is explaining his role at a TED talk in two thousand and seven. And then there's

monarchy and that's my role in the community. So I was describing this in Berlin once and the next day in the newspaper that the headline said, I am the Queen of England, and that's not exactly what I said. But Wales became king of Wikipedia because he and Sanger

had a falling out. Sanger wanted Wikipedia to be mostly written by experts, and Sanger made the rules, one of which, as The Atlantic Ones pointed out, was that if an article could conceivably have gone in Britannica, it was encyclopedic and permitted, but if not, it was not encyclopedic and to be deleted. Wells though he disagreed, he told that Ted Crowd he didn't want Wikipedia to be like Britannica

at all. In nineteen sixty two, Charles van Doren, who was later a senior editor at Britannica, said the ideal encyclopedia should be radical, it should stop being safe. But if you know anything about the history of Britannica since nineteen sixty two, it was anything but radical. Sanger was more or less forced out of Wikipedia. He went on to become a fairly ornary critic of it. He wrote

a book arguing that Wikipedia needs experts. Originally, the notion was Wikipedia was going to be paired with another website called Newpedia, which was going to actually vet the articles and post them as being expert approved. But that sort of approve of process fell by the way and Wikipedia just went on, you know, all by itself. Wikipedia, in other words, had something of a rocky start, but then it started getting bigger, and it also started getting better.

As of twenty twenty two, Wikipedia is the ninth most visited website in the United States and in the world. Britannica has a website, Britannica dot com. It's way back, somewhere in the eight hundreds. Wikipedia exists in more than three hundred languages. Each is a separate version, Britannica not so much. Britannica in the last print edition has got sixty five thousand articles. Wikipedia today has got more than

six million. Wikipedia is not perfect, but lately you won't hear a lot of arguments against the notion that Wikipedia is about the best thing on the Internet. It's like what people say about democracy, that it's a terrible form of government except for all the other ones. Wikipedia a terrible encyclopedia by except for all the other ones. You know, it's that same kind of problem. Jessamine West is a

librarian and a Wikipedia supereditor. She's got the best vantage on what's great about Wikipedia and what's still tricky about it, because I mean, you know, think about democracy, right, like democracy slowly gets better, But it used to be women couldn't vote, people of color couldn't vote, and now they can and is democracy fixed? No, but it's better, you know, and you still have to kind of fight for it

all the time. And that's the struggle. Wikipedia realizes on volunteer editors, which means it's only as good as the volunteers. Early on, a lot of the volunteers were guys who are online all the time, a certain sort of geek. So for a long time, for years, nearly everyone writing articles was a man, an English speaker, and white, just like the people who wrote the Encyclopedia Britannica, except maybe with fewer advanced degrees. And some of these Wikipedia guys

were either creepy or juvenile or both. Not all of them, of course, but there were these crazy dark alleys where some guys wrote endless entries about stuff that interested really only them. Porn stars in Pokemon is essentially you know, you want to see some really good Wikipedia pages, look at those. These first generation Wikipedians, like every Wikipedian, were also editors, vetting new content, especially content posted by people who were new to Wikipedia. Editors are great, but these guys.

They were not always great editors. Still, the editing eventually got a lot better. Also, Wikipedia developed new rules requiring citation. I think really the footnote saved Wikipedia. I once submitted an entry about a dead and long forgotten poet. It took nearly a year from my submitted entry to clear all the editorial hurdles. I loved that I was a new Wikipedian and hadn't been tried and tested yet. I love that people all over the world fixed up my article,

challenged my citations and made it better. Jessmine West has been a Wikipedian for so long. Her articles are so good that she earned a kind of promotion. You can get this weird little status that's called what's called auto patrolled, which means when you make an article, you write an article,

you write an article from scratch. It doesn't have to go through a whole bunch of hoops before it's kind of live on Wikipedia and everybody can see it, which means that it doesn't go through What I see is the dude gauntlet of people who are like this lady scientist isn't important, and you're like your opinion, sir. Maybe the part here that isn't important the Dude Gauntlet. That kind of thing raised a lot of questions about who

was doing what on Wikipedia. Scholars started studying it quantitatively and concluded that over the first ten years of Wikipedia, one percent of its contributors we're responsible for nearly eighty percent of its content. But is that at all surprising? I don't think so. Wikipedia is so huge that to write good articles and make good edits, it's just going to make sense that a very tiny fraction of Wikipedia

users are doing most of that work. That's not okay when that tiny fraction is the dude Gauntlet, a group of people who have in common not that they are good editors, but that they are men. But what if that tiny fraction is a broadly diverse group of people. West is especially proud of a Wikipedia project called Women in Red. If there's a link that goes to somebody who's not in Wikipedia yet, it's a red link, and then once that link goes to an active page, it's blue.

And so Women in Red is like, let's look at all these women who have red links, and let's write articles about them. And it's a huge project. People are writing, you know, pay dozens of pages about women every day on Wikipedia. The way West thinks about Wikipedia, it's like we're just in a sweet bought here in twenty twenty two,

where this is actually working. For all the misinformation and insanity on Facebook and YouTube and TikTok and whatnot, Wikipedia, in this iteration, anyway, is actually working during the whole of the pandemic. For instance, it was just an incredibly reliable source of information about COVID, and I think mainly because it requires citation, because it favors reliable sources, because

it's constantly updated, because it can be corrected. West is eloquent on the subject of embracing imperfection, of knowing that figuring out what's true and what's not is endless work. He can't take shortcuts. There's always gonna be people who sort of crab about things, and I think you see that on any topic. And so some of it's just deciding about your outlook. Some of it's deciding how you want to get involved, if it's a way that is

useful for you. And some of it is I think the scales fall from your eyes understanding that everything's perfect, but if you can understand how a thing is imperfect, that allows you to make the corrections using your own human brain and your own human eyeballs to get the knowledge out of it that you want. A few years back, Jessamine West solved something known as the neck beard hoax.

Oh my god, I love this story so much. Online, citing Wikipedia, people started quoting something Louisa May Alcott had said trash talking Henry David Threau. Allegedly, Alcott had said to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the rose neckbeard will most assuredly deflect amorous advances and preserve the man's virtue and perpetuity. So neckbeard, right, it's a derogatory term for you know,

a type of internet man or internet beard. Have her sorry that you know you've got this weird kind of slobby beard, and it probably implies a whole bunch of things about you. Is the is the kind of Internet zeitgeist about it, And a lot of people would bolster their negative opinions of neck beard Havers by saying that Louisa May Alcott used to dish on Thorow's neck beard. They'd always provide some kind of a citation because they had to. I was like, well, that's kind of interesting.

It doesn't seem that sounds weird, and so I looked, because it's Wikipedia, right, I was like, well, where does that fact come from? Drop down to the bottom comes from some sixteen volume Emerson collection of Letters. I was like, oh god, this is the worst. But I was like, okay, I bet I can find that online. Probably. So she did what any good research or any good archivists, good librarian, good citizen would do. She tried to find a reliable

original source for this quote. She called up scholars, other archivists, other variants, Emerson experts, no Alcott on Throw's neck beard. Wherever she looked, she couldn't find it. And I'm like, that's not there. So she went back to Wikipedia, and then I went looking to like who made that edit which you can find, and what other edits they made, like two or three kind of jokey bs edits like around the same time, and then they were never seen

on Wikipedia again. And that quote was like an Internet darling for years, years because people love it, right, because it reinforces feelings or stereotypes that they already have. And so I was just like, well, hack with this, went into the page, deleted that sentence, you know, wrote a little edit Summary, which is another part of Wikipedia where you can tell why you did what you did. And I was like, this never happened. Never happened, So she

corrected it defended the neck beards. Wikipedia in the end is, I think exactly what Encyclopedia Britannica wanted to be, at least at first, the perfect instrument of the Enlightenment, the universal diffusion of knowledge through the collective exercise of human reason and the enthusiasm for discovery, observation, discernment, and judgment. I asked my Rentaxment about it. Do you use Wikipedia? Oh, oh, constantly. A matter of fact, I just gave them a donation.

They're always you know. I like Wikipedia. Actually I use Wikipedia constantly too, and like my Rentaxment full disclosure, I donate. I also worry it can't last, because it does cost a lot to keep it going, servers people's labor, and yet it's still free, and so I worry it'll get screwed up because so much that involves so many people so often get screwed up. But I'm grateful that for now. Anyway,

it's amazing. I learned that Wikipedia is sewing needle page for centuries Japan has celebrated something called the Festival of Broken Needles Harry Couyoh, where people lay their broken needles to rest with thanks. According to Wikipedia's entry about it, Harry Koyoh began four hundred years ago, has a way for housekeepers and professional needle workers to acknowledge their work

over the past years and respect their tools. Practitioners went to Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples to thank their broken needles for their help and service. So I guess this episode, this whole season of The Last Archive really is a

kind of festival of broken needles. My chance to say prayers of thanks for all the wikipedians and their tools, their facts and rules and sources and footnotes and talk pages and edit pages, and prayers of thanks to everyone else who's doing this good work with their tools, teachers, librarians, farmers, scientists stitching together with their needles the fabric of common knowledge. The Last Archive is written and hosted by me Jill Lapour. It's produced by Sophie Crane, Ben Natt of Haffrey and

Lucy Sullivan. Our editors are Julia Barton and Sophie Crane, and our executive producer is Mia Lobell. Jake Gorsky is our engineer. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original music by Matthias Boss and John Evans of Stellwagen Symfinett. Our research assistant is Mia Hazra. Our full proof player is Robert Ricotta. Many of our sound effects are from Harry Janette Junior and the Star Jennette Foundation. The Last Archive is a

production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus content like The Last Archivist, a limited series just for subscribers, and add free listening across our network for four ninety nine a month. Look for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm. If you like the show, please remember to rate, share and review. To find more Pushkin podcasts. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you

get your podcasts. I'm Jillapour