Bertha Palmer

Joy had no trouble adding the following information about Bertha Palmer, wife of the well-known land developer, Potter Palmer, to a Wikipedia article: Potter Palmer made provision in his will that a large sum of money should go to whoever next married Bertha. When asked why he would be so generous to his own replacement, he replied, “Because he’ll need it.”

In a few months Wikipedia is launching a new user-friendly interface to make it easier to edit and contribute articles. Wikipedia hopes to lure back the thousands of contributors who have dropped out as the encyclopedia’s rules grew more complex. The change is in reaction to some horrendous entries. In 2005, for example, John Seigenthaler Sr., a noted journalist, was said to be one of John F. Kennedy’s assassins.

Anyone can go to Wikipedia and add an article or edit one, but your contributions may be deleted by the higher-ups or “deletionists” as they are sometimes called. The key to getting something to stick is having lots of sources for your material. You can find an article on the history of Pez dispensers, for example, because lots of articles have been written about them. But you won’t find one on Adolphe Saint-Valry, a close friend of author Victor Hugo. As John Broughton, author of two books on Wikipedia, noted: “If a tree falls in the forest, and no mainstream media source writes about it, then as far as Wikipedia is concerned, the tree didn’t exist.”

This just came online a week ago. It gives you the news highlights for any day or month, any year, if they have it. In January, 1660, for example, Samuel Pepys began his famous diary.

You can request news not only by date but by subject: Just technology, for example, or art, or sports. On April 13^th, 1931, Andrew Millikan, first measured the charge of an electron. If you click on a TIME Magazine issue for any date, you get the contents of the whole magazine. Neat, eh?

In case you missed the opening credits, Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia with 9 million entries, tens of thousands of unpaid contributors and editors, and you can read it in any of 250 languages. By the way: It’s all free.

Unlike a traditional encyclopedia in book form, Wikipedia exists only on the Internet. Also unlike a traditional encyclopedia, it is updated continuously. Encyclopedias such as Britannica or World Book are usually updated annually or semi-annually. If you have the book version, a new volume comes out to add whatever significant changes have occurred, usually in history and the sciences. But Wikipedia is updated daily, even hourly.

How will the encyclopedia companies survive? In straitened circumstances, no doubt. The Britannica is also online now, and can be read there for a subscription fee of $70, renewed each year. It also includes access to articles from 403 magazines, which is nice. There’s still a print version, which sells for $1,400.

We don’t know how long it took Britannica to face reality, but we know when the moment began. We’ve been doing this column long enough to have been pitched on the first CD version of the Britannica, for which the company wanted $1,000, almost exactly the same price as the bound volumes. There’s no way on Earth you’re going to be able to sell this for a thousand dollars, we said. Why not, the company said, it’s the same information. And so, as the poet sayeth, the long night began.

Unlike the traditional encyclopedias, anyone can write an article or make an addition to Wikipedia. But it’s a good idea to start by playing in the sandbox. Just go to the Wikipedia Web site (Wikipedia.org) and type “WP:sand” in the search box. Then make any changes you want. Or plunge right in. Joy recently did this and added some information about Bertha Palmer, the imperious wife of Potter Palmer, a railroad car tycoon of the late 19th century.

What about false information? How can Wikipedia prevent scurrilous entries? Well, in the same way any publication has to handle its material: by editors going over it. Wikipedia has tens of thousands of editors, nearly all volunteers, a mix of amateurs, specialists and professionals forced out of their jobs by mandatory retirement rules. They’ve found some interesting and amusing things.

For example: If you type “editor’s index to Wikipedia” in the Wikipedia search box, you see every important editing change that has been made. Among these are changes made to the records and history of politicians by people who work for them. For example, you can click on edits made by congressional staffers and find that they have edited out unfavorable information about their bosses and added extra unfavorable information about their rivals. (Whatever happened to the idea that these are public servants?)

Ah, it’s a grand circus that we have before us, and you can read more about it in “Wikipedia, The Missing Manual,” by John Broughton ($30 from missingmanual.com). He’ll tell you what Wikipedia isn’t, as well as what it is. It isn’t a dictionary, though you can get one at Wiktionary.org. It isn’t a collection of textbooks, but you can get those at Wikibooks. You can get travel guides at Wikitravel and how-to manuals at Wikihow.

What Wikipedia is, is beautifully described in the “Missing Manual,” and you can find templates to help you create your own online articles from scratch. The author, by the way, has edited about 15,000 Wikipedia articles himself.

We can make a little fun of it, but this is a well-done program. You can also have a little fun with it. We played “Know Your U.S. History” and “Time Traveler,” learning odd facts about the origins of things: Did you know the present Great Wall of China is only about 500 years old? The original, much older wall, is visible only in small parts.

Searching a topic brings up articles, photos, maps and even corresponding quotes. We wondered where the word “bum” came from. We didn’t find the answer, but we did get Marlon Brando’s lines from the movie “On the Waterfront,” complaining to his brother: “I coulda been a contender. Instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it.”

The section on physics includes a discussion of British physicist Paul Dirac’s string theory of just about everything. Without that article we would still be ignorant of the existence of “selectrons” and “photinos,” which sounds vaguely like an Italian fast-service picture kiosk. The full program includes dictionaries matching English with Italian, Spanish, French and German.

Microsoft Student with Encarta Premium, 2008, lists for $50. If you want it without Microsoft Student, it’s $30; you can buy the math section on its own for $20. Find your way atMicrosoft.com/student/default.mspx.

The core of Microsoft Student is Encarta. This started out 25 years ago as a kind of junk encylopedia bought from Funk & wagnals, but it has been gradually improved and enlarged to the point that it is now our first choice for reference material. The environmental section for kids is better than reading a book on the subject and very fair-minded. Excellent gamest each geography, science, math and languages. The jobs and careers section has templates for resumes and introductory letters.

An interesting thing happens to your Internet Explorer Web browser after you load Microsoft Student: An Encarta box appears on the right of the screen. Any search term you enter for searching the Web is also entered in the Encarta box. Click on that box and you are taken to the online version of Encarta, where the information can provide crucial background for what you are picking up from the Web.

Other parts of Student teach you how to create charts and graphs in Microsoft Excel and Word. A project section teaches you how to create brochures, time lines and posters. There’s plenty more and lots of info atwww.microsoft.com.