Thursday, December 01, 2005
The New Oxford English Dictionary
Did anyone read The Professor and the Madman, the story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary? It was a bit tedious, but the way they actually produced the thing was fascinating. The guy running the project got a bunch of people to read a bunch of books and locate words to put in the dictionary, and then they spent something like 75 years collecting and defining the things. The modern equivalent is Wikipedia. It's a collaborative effort where people enter information into an online encyclopedia. I have found it to be very useful. It's the place I turn to first when I want an answer to "what is... something", rather than Google. Via my favorite lefty blog, I saw a pointer to this article about the dangers of the unpoliced community model for Wikipedia. Interesting.
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I first encountered Wikipedia through a favorite little personal utility I use. If you go to answers.com and select downloads there's a little thing called, in it's current incarnation: "1-Click AnswersTM for Windows" (available for Mac and other platforms, too). It's memory resident with negligible performance impact that I've noticed ... anyway, as you browse, you can just float the mouse over any word, key alt-click, and a complete definition of the term along with discussion a la Wikipedia pops up in a little window! Very cool ... very high tech ... but also very dangerous; easy to get pulled into a labyrinth of follow-ons. This leads to that, etc. Sometimes I'm six new topics deep before I start wondering: "how the heck did I wind up reading about this?"
The conclusion to the story is here. The perpetrator is flushed out and confesses.
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