Gleick writes about the encyclopedia before wikipedia. "fallaciously called The Anglo American Cyclopedia". A warren of fiction mingling with fact, another hall of mirrors and misprints, a compendium of pure and impure information that projects its own world. That world is called Tlon. "It is conjectured that this brave new world is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebraists, moralists, painters, geometers..."
At first this "world was considered to be complete chaos, "an irresponsible license of imagination". Another library of Babel was found to be "a record, scrambled yet permanent, of every human utterance."
This is where I believe Wikipedia and the traditional print based libraries are similar. In a large sense, Wikipedia is just a chaotic network of human utterance. There are sometimes hundreds of links within each page that takes you all over the site. Sometimes you forget what you began searching. The information found on wikipedia I believe to be a mixture of pure and impure information. Anyone can post on Wikipedia if you make an account. This means that if you are smart enough to have an email address and make a username and password that you can edit information on Wikipedia. (Meaning that my grandma who knows the basics of the internet could edit information about coding a website) If you didn't get it, its a scary thought. This might be a little different than the old libraries. Gleick mentions titles for the contributors to the cyclopedia, whereas today surfer_girl_2003 could write about brain surgery.
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