Back when I conceived this project towards the end of 2022, I looked up a few random terms just to see if they were in the 2020 World Book. There was a second term that I was going to include in this post, but alas, it has ben lost to time in that I can’t remember what it was.
Nevertheless, I do remember some peculiarity surrounding at least one term/subject: MP3.
World Book
It turns out, World Book 2020 does not have an entry at all for mp3 even though the format had been popular for at least twenty years at this point.
I didn’t expect for World Book to have an in-depth discussion, but I did expect at least a small entry.
Encyclopedia Britannica
The EB does, in fact, contain an entry for mp3. However, it is only four paragraphs long.
This is what I expected out of World Book.
World Book is a publication for a simpler, less educated people. I get that. While I didn’t expect a full, detailed explanation of the format from the EB, I have to say I am disappointed that the EB didn’t make more of an effort.##
Wikipedia
Wikipedia’s entry is more in line with the length of article I expected from Encyclopedia Britannica, if not its content.
The trouble I have with Wikipedia’s entry is that while it goes to the depth of knowledge I want, it does so at the expense of understandability.
Attempting to read through the Wikipedia entry on mp3, I realize a few things:
Understanding the format is difficult because the format was created by people who were at the pinnacle of knowledge in their chosen fields.
There is a lot of math, physics and psychology involved just to understand the basic ideas behind the format, much less the implementation. And that’s before you get to further compression tricks like Huffman coding.
(To be fair, Huffman coding is a “simple” technique that is usually taught to Computer Science undergraduates; my point here is that it is yet another piece of specialized knowledge necessary to understand the mp3 format.)
Aggregation Theory or Wikipedia to the Rescue!
While I think it is naive to make a sweeping generalization based this simple comparison on a single term I think there is a lesson here or at least an experience that can be re-experienced.
Emotionally, I remember when Wikipedia first came into my conscious. I remember thinking something along the lines of “WOW! All this information at my fingertips and it’s more in depth than encyclopedias on the shelf!”
What I couldn’t appreciate at the time was that this was Aggregation Theory in action. (I couldn’t appreciate this fact, in part, because Thompson hadn’t yet created his theory at the time.)
As a young technologist, I was thrilled that Wikipedia was one more example of the triumph of the kind of Humanism or progress that made the Renaissance possible; SEE ALSO The 5000 Year Leap and James May’s 20th Century.
However, the dark side of Aggregation Theory is that once the “best” or superlative to the market gains its monopoly status, it is then a monopoly and that means it can act as a monopoly. While this may not be as big of an issue in certain markets–especially if the natural monopoly is a benevolent dictator, the fact of the matter is it is not in human nature to be benevolent dictators; it is human nature to be a dictator, however.
So, if Wikipedia puts Encyclopedia Britannica or World Book out of business, Wikipedia now has a monopoly on being a source of high quality, authoritative general knowledge. The monopolistic power Wikipedia then has at its disposal is similar to that of Winston Smith’s job in George Orwell’s 1984: Wikipedia will then be able to “edit” history simply by what it does or doesn’t include in its entries.
Science is therefore corruptible, to say nothing of politics. And humanity is none-the-wiser.
That’s a chilling thought.