Nicholson Baker on Wikipedia
I'm currently reading Nicholson Baker's forthcoming book Human Smoke (excellent so far, but I've really only just begun it), so it was with particular interest that I took a glance at his new essay, "The Charms of Wikipedia" , in The New York Review of Books . I intended to set it aside for later reading, but it was quite engaging, and I'm a big fan of Wikipedia, so before long I found myself completely engrossed. And often laughing: This is a reference book that can suddenly go nasty on you. Who knows whether, when you look up Harvard's one-time warrior-president, James Bryant Conant , you're going to get a bland, evenhanded article about him, or whether the whole page will read (as it did for seventeen minutes on April 26, 2006): "HES A BIG STUPID HEAD." James Conant was, after all, in some important ways, a big stupid head. He was studiously anti-Semitic, a strong believer in wonder-weapons—a man who was quite as happy figuring out new ...
