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 The xkcd cartoon on the Star Trek Into Darkness dispute |
| “ | When it comes to world class pedantry, few groups can challenge the prowess of Wikipedians and Star Trek fans. So when the two come together it's little surprise they create a swirling maelstrom of anal retention from which no common sense can escape.[1] | ” |
The comic xkcd drew attention to one of Wikipedia's bitter title debates on 30 January 2013 with this cartoon. The topic: the capitalisation or non-capitalisation of the word "into" in the title of the upcoming Star Trek film, Star Trek Into Darkness. The question had generated tens of thousands of words of discussion on the article's talk page, as well as various subpages.
Given that Wikipedia's Manual of Style directs that prepositions with four letters or less should not normally be capitalised in titles, the discussion hinged on whether "Star Trek into darkness" should be understood as a single phrase, like "the journey into space", or whether the word "into" marked the beginning of a subtitle whose first word should be capitalised. Another factor was that the film's makers and most media reports capitalised the word "Into" in the film's title. A minority view also advocated that it should be seen as a subtitle (like other Star Trek movies) and therefore needed a colon, i.e. "Star Trek: Into Darkness".
In his Daily Dot article, titled "Wikipedians wage war over a capital 'I' in a 'Star Trek' film", Morris summarized the entire affair in the quote above, and cited User:Frungi to give his readers a brief summary of arguments in favour of an upper-case or lower-case spelling, saying he did not want want his readers to experience in "excruciating detail the main arguments from both sides. They are exhaustive and pedantic to such an extent that 'pedantic' no longer seems a suitable adjective."
Frungi's summary, compiled on 11 January, read:
Morris chose to use a capital I throughout his article, saying he agreed with the passionate sentiments of an anonymous vandal who told Wikipedians to read the official website.
The Independent weighed in on the controversy a day later, on 31 January 2013 ("Trekkies take on Wikis in a grammatical tizzy over Star Trek Into Darkness"), asking its resident grammarian Guy Keleny to adjudicate.
Keleny acknowledged the ambiguity introduced by the missing colon, which allowed an interpretation of the title along the lines of "This is the story of the Star Trek into Darkness", but concluded:
| “ | There’s only one thing to do. Follow the preference of the film-makers. It is their title, after all. They call it Star Trek Into Darkness—so that is what it is. In the same way, for instance, everybody accepts that the singer is called k d lang. Her typographical peculiarity may be pretentious and irritating, but her name belongs to her. | ” |
Science fiction news site Blastr took much the same view. The title of the Wikipedia entry was changed from lower-case to upper-case spelling on 31 January.
On 30 January 2013, Rebecca J. Rosen, senior associate editor of The Atlantic, reported on a paper by Jeff Loveland and Joseph Reagle which argues that rather than being a break with the past, Wikipedia and Wikipedians are actually part of a long tradition of "obsessive compilers" that created "not just encyclopedias, but dictionaries, medical texts, histories, and even object collections, such as herbaria". Loveland and Reagle note a commonality between the methods used to build Wikipedia and various "encyclopedias of old":
| “ | ... the process of building upon existing work bit by bit, or what the authors call "stigmergic accumulation." Now, that's a mouthful, but it's also a great metaphor. "Stigmergy," they write, describes "how wasps and termites collectively build complex structures by adding to the product of previous work rather than by communicating directly among themselves." | ” |
Piracy and other types of "borrowing" in such endeavours were common. Ephraim Chambers' 1728 Cyclopaedia "borrowed heavily from the Dictionnaire de Trevoux," and in turn was reprinted in full by Scottish "pirates". Chambers himself confessed that the Cyclopaedia contained "little ... new, and of my own growth."
| “ | Men like Chambers were always a bit author, a bit compiler, a bit borrower, a bit editor. If Wikipedia complicates the notion of "authorship," it's not as though that notion were ever simple to begin with.
Even Wikipedia's open ideology has antecedents during this period. Diderot announced that people were free to reuse the art from his Encyclopedie—"a stance," the authors note, "probably meant to justify his and his colleagues' appropriation of illustrations from the 'Description des arts et metiers.'" |
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Wikipedia's collaborative approach, too, is really a function of the size of the task, and has its precedents in previous projects of comparable magnitude. Something very much like a crowdsourcing approach was used to compile the Oxford English Dictionary for example. Thousands of people contributed to the effort, sending in slips of paper noting words in their context. Diderot's and d'Alembert's encyclopedia had over 140 different contributors.
Jeff Loveland, a historian of encyclopedias, had previously reviewed Reagle's book Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia and criticized it for having "one major weakness, namely in historical contextualization" (see report in the 28 November 2011 issue of the Signpost). The ensuing discussions between Loveland and Reagle led to this collaboration.
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