http://pynchonwiki.com already under attack!

[Anville Azote]

Jasper Fidget <jasper.fidget at gmail.com> wrote:
> [...]  I anticipate the wiki turning into a junkyard full of people's half-baked opinions and
> Kinbote-esque commentary (i.e. worse than useless).

In reply to which, pynchonoid <pynchonoid at yahoo.com> wrote:
> That's Pynchon-l you're describing, certainly.
>
> I think you're wrong about the potential for
> http://pynchonwiki.com.  So far, it is nothing like
> your description and is instead a useful resource that
> will grow more so as more people contribute useful
> information.
>

And in reply to the above, I say:

First of all, Kinbote's commentary isn't "worse than useless".  His
digressions on Zembla have blasted little to do with John Shade's
Appalachia, but leaving aside the value of the Forward (which gives
the reader their first brush with Shade and, in some respects, a more
complete visual impression), the Commentary and Index provide a
counterpart and complement to the 999 lines of the poem itself.  The
book in its entirety is an artifice, deceptive and illuminating; if
pynchonwiki.com produces anything like **Pale Fire,** its authors
would have every right to be proud.

"Ha ha, only serious."

http://burks.brighton.ac.uk/burks/foldoc/6/51.htm

Second, the pynchonwiki has the potential to become something I wished
Wikipedia could provide:  a place to provide factual material of
scholarly use, backed up with pointers to papers and books, **plus**
the opportunity to generate new literary talk with kindred folks.  You
can't do that over at WP.  Even applying the bread-and-butter methods
of lit-crit one learns in the undergraduate years is a sin, or in the
argot, Original Research.  In WP territory, you can't discuss a new
book, even with old methods, only report what other people have said
about old books.  This is appropriate for an encyclopedia, but it
can't constitute the whole of discourse.

Human behavior implies some basic facts about wiki life.  Foremost is
the under-acknowledged issue that in any situation where the wiki
grows by people contributing their free time, the majority of edits
will be minor ones, affecting (and affected by) only their immediate
environment.  Lists can grow item by item, for example, much more
easily than entire articles can be overhauled.  Thus, even in cases
where a page contains all the **facts** one needs, the organization
will often be poor.  Also, ensuring coordination among multiple pages
can be difficult and tiresome to achieve.

These societal traits make wikis a good repository for things like
lists of typos, catalogs of character names and so forth.  In these
cases, small edits **can** build a workable and useful whole by
incremental additions.  However, there is an unhappy flipside.  Most
of the really good articles on WP (say, those listed in "Featured
Articles") are the work of one person or a small group, say a
couple-three editors, who assemble a clear and thorough exposition of
a topic which interests them.  Remarkably often, such people can do a
really terrific job.  They push the article up to Featured status (I
did this five times --- all it takes is energy and care), where it can
sit and bask in the glory. . . .  And attract a stream of well-meaning
editors who come along, adding their favorite tidbit of information,
little drops of this or that which may well be completely accurate but
which don't fit into the scheme painfully worked out by the original
authors.

After this goes on for long enough, the original authors or others
with a like-minded sense of dedication have to go through and clean up
the cruft.

I saw several cycles of this happen with the article **Calvin and
Hobbes**.  Everybody has their own favorite **Calvin and Hobbes**
strip, and damn if they don't want to talk about it!  This sort of
thing is a big reason why WP has "Featured Article Review", a
mechanism for forcing cruft patrol and, if necessary, taking pages off
the honor roll.

If pynchonwiki is to be a going concern, it'll need mechanisms for
keeping track of good content.  Somebody will also have to institute
ground rules for keeping debate fair and dealing with the inevitable
hotheads and trolls (trust me, no subject is too obscure to attract
crackpottery).  Otherwise, we're just prayin' for that anarchist
miracle.

Pirate Prentice wrote:

> There's basically 3 things the wiki does at the moment: 1) straight up
> reference (what was the Chicago World's Fair and when did it happen?),
> 2) connections to other Pynchon novels ("single up all lines" also
> appears on these pages of GR and V., "entropy" was a major theme in
> GR, etc), and 3) interpretation.

I think that any work people do on #3 (which is what Wikipediphiles
call "original research") should be credited to the people who do it,
since it is after all value generated by labor.  To an extent, #2
shades into #3, depending upon how much one has to squint to draw the
connections.  The many avatars of Pig Bodine are less subtle than the
postage-stamp references in ATD, for example.

-A. A.