It’s been a quarter-century since the death knell sounded for those old chests of drawers in libraries.
Were you card-carrying member of the Olds era, you remember them. Three sections of cards, alphabetically organized according to author, subject, or title.
We started our search there and if we what we wanted, we wrote down the Dewey Decimal number and went on an expedition into the stacks. With luck the book would be there.
Were we desperate to tell the younger set about how good we had it then, we could tell them about how we wrote term papers.
Be sure to include the tale of the 3×5-inch cards on which we wrote what we now call a “byte’ of information.”
The next step came when you used your own brain’s RAM (Random Access Memory) to arrange all the cards to write the outline. After the rough draft came the finished paper to turn in for a grade.
That all came to an end 25 years ago when a new way of seeking information slithered into our lives with the introduction of Wikipedia. Of course to use it you had to have a computer nd printer. They were a pain and the neck, or about two and a half feet down.
My friend Jesse had an early model. It was a Time-X that had to be rigged to a small television, a cassette tape recorder for storage, and a dot matrix printer.
I took one look at it, sniffed in derision and went back to a desktop manual Adler. It was faster, if only in the early years. I was sure nothing would replace “Addie.”
Wikipedia changed everything. No more treks to and from a school or public library, a table full of books or periodicals.
Instead, in front of us were thousands of pages of articles on every imaginable subject.
It wasn’t just the card catalogs that began disappearing. Printed encyclopedias, especially the World Books that were the pride of every middle-class home, were becoming a thing of the past.
No more earnest salesmen knocking on the front door to guilt-shame adults into buying a set so their children would excel in school, go to a prestigious college and get a white-collar job. No more instructions from The Olds, to “look it up in the encyclopedia; that’s what we paid good money for, so use it and show a little appreciation.”
Wikipedia introduced itself as an online encyclopedia, a free public service one-stop research center. It was also written, if only in theory in the beginning, by people who were knowledgeable in the subject, and anyone could give it a peer-review and make changes. That meant it was updated instantly, and some of the updates were edited and changed.
In the past, let’s say Professor Twitwillow wanted to write a paper on the purple-crested hoopoe (a bird in Africa). He or she would prepare a paper, send it to an ornithology periodical, and in time it might or might not get into print.
With Wikipedia, Twitwillow Jr. would write the paper, upload it to the online encyclopedia, then it was fair game anyone to change, or for Twitwillow to delete the correct, edit and rewrite it.
It was the wild west of academia where anything goes. Egos sometimes got in the way of common sense, and instead of a showdown on main street, the combatants went at it online. The flame-wars made for tremendous fun.
Soon, new computer programs made it possible for students to copy word-for-word an article, or just paste into their paper and turn it in for a grade. For teachers that was akin to lighting a cherry bomb under their chair. It was terrifying time as they debated academic honesty.
About that time, when I was an adjunct professor at a nearby college, we were ordered to attend emergency top-secret meetings on the Wikipedia crisis. sSecurity guarded the door.
How could we stop students from using the system? Should we bring back loyalty oaths where they had to pledge they did not use it? But then, how would we know if they were telling the truth?
A dot-com company came up with a program that could scan a student paper and snitch on the cheaters. I caught a few.
The funniest came when I asked a fellow if he was cheating by using Wiki. He swore that he hadn’t used it, but the evidence was there. Whole paragraphs had been lifted into his paper.
I pointed out the error of his ways and he didn’t like it. Finally he shouted, “I tell you I didn’t cheat. My sister did my homework for me and wrote the paper.”
His answer sort of defeated the whole purpose of learning. I gave him a mulligan on it and said he had one chance to write the paper himself and without cheating. What happened after that? He followed me out to the car, campus security saw the fracas and the police came calling.
Over the past 25 years, Wikipedia has matured. It is still a nonprofit organization available to anyone. It still relies on volunteer contributors for most of the information it publishes.
Most importantly, they still rely on volunteer editors and fact checkers. Sometimes, it gets a bit vicious when egos get into a war of words. I see it as a different form of academic debate.
The middle weekend of January brings not only the Cubs Convention, but a Wikipedia editors conclave. Area editors are invited to get together to discuss their work and hear about new trends.
One of them will be given the accolade of the major contributor of the year, with a handful of runners up.
Wikipedia administrators are increasingly demanding citing one’s sources. The result is it is more reliable than before. Plus, it continues to grow as contributors publish pieces on every possible obscure topic.
Let’s say you are a fan of “Anne of Green Gables” and you know it is set near Cavendish on Prince Edward Island in Canada. With Wikipedia, you can read the history of the place, famous people who lived there and even get the map coordinates.
All of it is referenced and citations given in the end notes. All you have to do is memorize a bit of the information and you can amaze your fellow book club members. Or talk so much you can bore them into slumber land. Of course, they might nickname you a know-it-all or a little professor.
The temptation of wholesale copying and pasting remains, but schools now have more resources to catch anyone who cheats.
Today, the new internet source of information is AI, more specifically ChatGPT. Sign on with it, then ask it any question or give it any assignment you want.
In a few moments it will start spitting out information, and then like an old-fashioned reference librarian, ask if you need more or have specific questions.
What will be the next advance? Perhaps it will be computer chips wired into our brains. That way we can talk to ourselves, ask any question and hear us answer ourselves. That could be fun.
Or we could return to thinking for ourselves instead of having a computer trot out answers. That would be even more fun.
