Professors can — and will — debate whether Wikipedia is waging war against expertise or simply giving folks outside of academe a chance to speak. But one thing about the site is inarguable: It has emboldened a generation of surprisingly young encyclopedists.
The New York Times profiles a few such scribes, including Matthew Gruen, a Wikipedia writer who earned rave reviews for shaping an article about the arrest of six men who allegedly planned to attack Fort Dix. Mr. Gruen, who is known to other Wikipedians as “Gracenotes,” is a dedicated and scrupulous contributor to the Web site. And he is 16 years old: [H]e will often, after his homework is done and his church responsibilities are fulfilled, spend six hours or more a night cleaning up errors in the encyclopedia. An amateur programmer and calculus buff who lives near Poughkeepsie, N.Y., he became seriously involved with Wikipedia just about eight months ago, after his parents ordered him out of a different online community of which they did not approve.
Critics of Wikipedia may take Gracenote’s age as evidence that the site’s contributors are not to be trusted. But professors would do well to harness the passion that students like Mr. Gruen have for the encyclopedia. —Brock Read
8 Responses to The Young Minds Behind Wikipedia
kelly_house - April 3, 2012 at 5:23 am
Two of the most gut-wrenching speeches in Shakespeare are almost entirely monosyllabic, both from King Lear, Act V.
King Lear carrying his dead daughter Cordelia:
Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones:
Had I your tongues and eyes, I’ld use them so
That heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone for ever!
I know when one is dead, and when one lives;
She’s dead as earth. Lend me a looking-glass;
If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,
Why, then she lives.
And his final speech, the relentless nevers all the more jarring for the preceding three lines of one syllable words:
And my poor fool is hang’d! No, no, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!
Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir.
Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,
Look there, look there!
seattlenerd - April 3, 2012 at 6:05 am
Interesting. The monosyllabic impulse might be a peculiarity of English.
The following isn’t monosyllabic, but it is punchy, brief, and doesn’t translate easily into English:
yo quiero hacer contigo,
lo que la primavera
hace con las cerezas
(Pablo Neruda)
It does translate, just not really naturally —
“I want to do with you
what the Spring(time)
does with the cherry (trees)”
———
For punchy poetry in English, with plenty of monosyllables (but not exclusively monosyllables), may I suggest
I sing of Olaf, by e.e.cummings
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15408
ksmanning - April 3, 2012 at 7:38 am
Monosyllabic isn’t.
earshape - April 3, 2012 at 9:09 am
Othello’s Put out the light, and then put out the light.
And the contrast in Hamlet’s Absent thee from felicity awhile/ And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain…
11223435 - April 3, 2012 at 9:20 am
It may well be that our lovely English
was never iambic pentameter,
and to pretend so simply amateur.
godman - April 3, 2012 at 1:09 pm
Monosyllabicity is not peculiarly an English feature. There are many non-Germanic tongues which are basically monosyllabic; take for instance the following Tongue Twisting lines in partly Acoli and partly Lango cognate tongues of the Nilotic family:
Cal a cega cal ki en.
armado - April 3, 2012 at 1:58 pm
Othello: It is the Cause, it is the Cause (my Soul)
Let me not name it to you, you chaste Stars,
It is the Cause. Yet I ’ll not shed her blood,
Nor scar that whiter skin of hers, than Snow,
And smooth as Monumental Alabaster:
Yet she must die, else she ’ll betray more men:
Put out the Light, and then put out the Light:
If I quench thee, thou flaming Minister,
I can again thy former light restore,
Should I repent me. But once put out thy Light,
Thou cunningst Pattern of excelling Nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can thy Light re-Lume.
When I have plucked thy Rose,
I cannot give it vital growth again,
It needs must wither. I ’ll smell thee on the Tree.
O Balmy breath, that dost almost persuade
Justice to break her Sword. One more, one more:
Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee,
And love thee after. One more, and that ’s the last.
So sweet, was ne’er so fatal. I must weep,
But they are cruel Tears: This sorrow ’s heavenly,
It strikes, where it doth love. She wakes.
22211497 - April 7, 2012 at 12:38 pm
A great rhetorician at Yale, the late Professor Leon Lipson, delivered the entire 1979 commencement address of Yale Law School in monosyllables. Yale Law Report, No. 1, Fall 1979