The Information (74 page)

Wikipedia evolves dendritically, sending off new shoots in many
directions. (In this it resembles the universe.) So deletionism and inclusionism spawn mergism and incrementalism. They lead to factionalism, and the factions fission into Associations of Deletionist Wikipedians and Inclusionist Wikipedians side by side with the Association of Wikipedians Who Dislike Making Broad Judgments About the Worthiness of a General Category of Article, and Who Are in Favor of the Deletion of Some Particularly Bad Articles, but That Doesn’t Mean They Are Deletionists. Wales worried particularly about Biographies of Living Persons. In an ideal world, where Wikipedia could be freed from practical concerns of maintenance and reliability, Wales said he would be happy to see a biography of every human on the planet. It outdoes Borges.

Even then, at the impossible extreme—every person, every bicycle screw—the collection would possess nothing like All Knowledge. For encyclopedias, information tends to come in the form of topics and categories.
Britannica
framed its organization in 1790 as “a plan entirely new.”
^♦
It advertised “the different sciences and arts” arranged as “distinct Treatises or Systems”—

In Wikipedia the detached parts of knowledge tend to keep splitting. The editors analyzed the logical dynamics as Aristotle or Boole might have:

Charles Dickens had earlier considered this very problem. In
The Pickwick Papers
, a man is said to have read up in the
Britannica
on Chinese metaphysics. There was, however, no such article: “He read for metaphysics under the letter M, and for China under the letter C, and combined his information.”
^♦

In 2008 the novelist Nicholson Baker, calling himself Wageless, got sucked into Wikipedia like so many others, first seeking information and then tentatively supplying some, beginning one Friday evening with the article on bovine somatotropin and, the next day,
Sleepless in Seattle
, periodization, and hydraulic fluid. On Sunday it was pornochanchada (Brazilian sex films), a football player of the 1950s called Earl Blair, and back to hydraulic fluid. On Tuesday he discovered the Article Rescue Squadron, dedicated to finding articles in danger of deletion and saving them by making them better instead. Baker immediately signed up, typing a note: “I want to be a part of this.” His descent into obsession is documented in the archives, like everything else that happens on Wikipedia, and he wrote about it a few months later in a print publication,
The New York Review of Books
.

He concluded with a “secret hope”: that all the flotsam and jetsam could be saved, if not in Wikipedia than in “a Wikimorgue—a bin of broken dreams.” He suggested calling it Deletopedia. “It would have much to
tell us over time.” On the principle that nothing online ever perishes, Deletionpedia was created shortly thereafter, and it has grown by degrees. The Port Macquarie Presbyterian Church lives on there, though it is not, strictly speaking, part of the encyclopedia. Which some call the universe.

Names became a special problem: their disambiguation; their complexity; their collisions. The nearly limitless flow of information had the effect of throwing all the world’s items into a single arena, where they seemed to play a frantic game of Bumper Car. Simpler times had allowed simpler naming: “The Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them,” says Genesis; “and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.” For each creature one name; for each name one creature. Soon, however, Adam had help.

In his novel
The Infinities
, John Banville imagines the god Hermes saying: “A hamadryad is a wood-nymph, also a poisonous snake in India, and an Abyssinian baboon. It takes a god to know a thing like that.”
^♦
Yet according to Wikipedia,
hamadryad
also names a butterfly, a natural history journal from India, and a Canadian progressive rock band. Are we all now as gods? The rock band and the wood nymph could coexist without friction, but more generally the breaking down of information barriers leads to conflict over names and naming rights. Impossible as it seems, the modern world is running out of names. The roster of possibilities seems infinite, but the demand is even greater.

The major telegraph companies, struggling in 1919 with the growing problem of misdirected messages, established a Central Bureau for Registered Addresses. Its central office in the financial district of New York filled an upstairs room on Broad Street with steel filing cabinets. Customers were invited to register code names for their addresses: single words of five to ten letters, required to be “pronounceable”—that is, “made up of syllables that appear in one of eight European languages.”
^♦
Many customers complained about the yearly charge—$2.50 per code name—but by 1934 the bureau was managing a list of 28,000, including
ILLUMINATE
(the New York Edison Company),
TOOTSWEETS
(the Sweet Company of America), and
CHERRYTREE
(George Washington Hotel).
^♦
The financier Bernard M. Baruch managed to get
BARUCH
all to himself. It was first come, first served, and it was a modest harbinger of things to come.

Cyberspace, of course, changes everything. A South Carolina company called Fox & Hound Realty, Billy Benton owner/broker, registered the domain name
BARUCH.COM
. A Canadian living in High Prairie, Alberta, registered
JRRTOLKIEN.COM
and held on to it for a decade, until a panel of the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva took it away from him. The name had value; others who claimed an interest in it, as a brand and a trademark, either registered or unregistered, included the late writer’s heirs, publisher, and filmmakers, not to mention the several thousand people worldwide who happened to share his surname. The same High Prairie man was basing a business on his possession of famous names: Céline Dion, Albert Einstein, Michael Crichton, Pierce Brosnan, and about 1,500 more. Some of these people fought back. A select few names—the pinnacles and hilltops—have developed a tremendous concentration of economic value. The word
Nike
is thought by economists to be worth $7 billion;
Coca-Cola
is valued at ten times more.

In the study of onomastics it is axiomatic that growing social units lead to growing name systems. For life in tribes and villages, single names like Albin and Ava were enough, but tribes gave way to clans, cities to nations, and people had to do better: surnames and patronyms; names based on geography and occupation. More complex societies demand more complex names. The Internet represents not just a new opportunity for fights over names but a leap in scale causing a phase transition.

An Atlanta music writer known as Bill Wyman received a cease-and-desist letter from lawyers representing the former Rolling Stone bass player also known as Bill Wyman; demanding, that is, that he “cease and desist”
using his name. In responding, the first Bill Wyman pointed out that the second Bill Wyman had been born William George Perks. The car company known in Germany as Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG fought a series of battles to protect the name Carrera. Another contender was the Swiss village, postal code 7122. “The village Carrera existed prior to the Porsche trademark,” Christoph Reuss of Switzerland wrote to Porsche’s lawyers. “Porsche’s use of that name constitutes a misappropriation of the goodwill and reputation developed by the villagers of Carrera.” He added for good measure, “The village emits much less noise and pollution than Porsche Carrera.” He did not mention that José Carreras, the opera singer, was embroiled in a name dispute of his own. The car company, meanwhile, also claimed trademark ownership of the numerals 911.

A useful term of art emerged from computer science:
namespace
, a realm within which all names are distinct and unique. The world has long had namespaces based on geography and other namespaces based on economic niche. You could be Bloomingdale’s as long as you stayed out of New York; you could be Ford if you did not make automobiles. The world’s rock bands constitute a namespace, where Pretty Boy Floyd and Pink Floyd and Pink coexist, along with the 13th Floor Elevators and the 99th Floor Elevators and Hamadryad. Finding new names in this space becomes a challenge. The singer and songwriter long called simply “Prince” was given that name at birth; when he tired of it, he found himself tagged with a meta-name, “the Artist Formerly Known as Prince.” The Screen Actors Guild maintains a formal namespace of its own—only one Julia Roberts allowed. Traditional namespaces are overlapping and melting together. And many grow overcrowded.

Pharmaceutical names are a special case: a subindustry has emerged to coin them, research them, and vet them. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration reviews proposed drug names for possible collisions, and this process is complex and uncertain. Mistakes cause death. Methadone, for opiate dependence, has been administered in place of Metadate, for attention-deficit disorder, and Taxol, a cancer drug, for
Taxotere, a different cancer drug, with fatal results. Doctors fear both look-alike errors and sound-alike errors: Zantac/Xanax; Verelan/Virilon. Linguists devise scientific measures of the “distance” between names. But Lamictal and Lamisil and Ludiomil and Lomotil are all approved drug names.

In the corporate namespace, signs of overcrowding could be seen in the fading away of what might be called simple, meaningful names. No new company could be called anything like General Electric or First National Bank or International Business Machines. Similarly, A.1. Steak Sauce could only refer to a food product with a long history. Millions of company names exist, and vast sums of money go to professional consultants in the business of creating more. It is no coincidence that the spectacular naming triumphs of cyberspace verge on nonsense: Yahoo!, Google, Twitter.

The Internet is not just a churner of namespaces; it is also a namespace of its own. Navigation around the globe’s computer networks relies on the special system of domain names, like
COCA-COLA.COM
. These names are actually addresses, in the modern sense of that word: “a register, location, or a device where information is stored.” The text encodes numbers; the numbers point to places in cyberspace, branching down networks, subnetworks, and devices. Although they are code, these brief text fragments also carry the great weight of meaning in the most vast of namespaces. They blend together features of trademarks, vanity license plates, postal codes, radio-station call letters, and graffiti. Like the telegraph code names, anyone could register a domain name, for a small fee, beginning in 1993. It was first come, first served. The demand exceeds the supply.

Too much work for short words. Many entities own “apple” trademarks, but there is only one
APPLE.COM
; when the domains of music and computing collided, so did the Beatles and the computer company. There is only one
MCDONALDS.COM
, and a journalist named Joshua Quittner registered it first. Much as the fashion empire of Giorgio Armani wanted
ARMANI.COM
, so did Anand Ramnath Mani of Vancouver, and
he got there first. Naturally a secondary market emerged for trade in domain names. In 2006, one entrepreneur paid another entrepreneur $14 million for
SEX.COM
. By then nearly every word in every well-known language had been registered; so had uncountable combinations of words and variations of words—more than 100 million. It is a new business for corporate lawyers. A team working for DaimlerChrysler in Stuttgart, Germany, managed to wrest back
MERCEDESSHOP.COM, DRIVEAMERCEDES.COM, DODGEVIPER.COM, CRYSLER.COM, CHRISLER.COM, CHRYSTLER.COM
, and
CHRISTLER.COM
.

The legal edifices of intellectual property were rattled. The response was a species of panic—a land grab in trademarks. As recently as 1980, the United States registered about ten thousand a year. Three decades later, the number approached three hundred thousand, jumping every year. The vast majority of trademark applications used to be rejected; now the opposite is true. All the words of the language, in all possible combinations, seem eligible for protection by governments. A typical batch of early twenty-first century United States trademarks:
GREEN CIRCLE, DESERT ISLAND, MY STUDENT BODY, ENJOY A PARTY IN EVERY BOWL!, TECHNOLIFT, MEETINGS IDEAS, TAMPER PROOF KEY RINGS, THE BEST FROM THE WEST, AWESOME ACTIVITIES
.