Picking up on the exploration of Nick Carr (here and here) and Jim, involving the notion of Wikipedia entries showing up very high in search engine results of short-tail topics, I decided to go down the tail slightly more. As some know, I have a hobbyist's interest in cartography, particularly from the 16th and 17th centuries. So I put in some keywords of well-known cartographers, as well as a few fictional locations that showed up on maps, the name of the first-ever atlas, and the name of the inventor of the clock that permitted the recording of longitude at sea. See after the jump:

Vespucci: #4
Waldseemuller: #2
Vinland: #1
St. Brendan's Island: #2
Prester John: #1
Mercator: #1
Hondius: #1
Blaeu: #7
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum: #2
Ortelius: #2
Terra Australis: #1
John Harrison: #1

Some of these, like Mercator, are pretty common terms in today's society, but some definitely are not, yet all are top 10 results. I was particularly disturbed that "John Harrison" didn't pull up at #1 the brilliant and fun-to-read book Longitude by Dava Sobel.

Nick searched for World War II and sex, and they were high. That could be explained by many people having opinions on those subjects, expanding the entries to make them more robust, and leading more sites to link to the entry. But what about Ortelius and his atlas, "Theatrum Orbis Terrarum"?* Why are they, which must be further down the tail from "sex," also high?

My theory, and it's only that, is that few people would be motivated to post information on that topic online, but at least some of them might enjoy the vanity exercise of creating and maintaining a Wikipedia entry. Also, I suspect there are people who actually use Wikipedia to learn about things, and might look up Ortelius there, creating traffic and links. (Something to be said for being first-to-market.) Also, Wikipedia seems inclined to create unique entries for things that many thinking people wouldn't necessarily believe needs a unique entry. For example, you can find a separate, detailed page on every single episode of Family Guy, including the first. Yet they don't have every episode broken out of F Troop, although they do have a page devoted to it.

With that in mind, I decided to go a bit farther down the tail. I searched for Battista Agnese, a relatively obscure Italian cartographer of the 16th century. Most of the great cartographers of the time were in Antwerp or Amsterdam. Agnese's sales didn't really extend far beyond the landed gentry of Italian city-states, who liked his portolan-style navigational maps and hung them on their walls (they were really far too ornate to have been favored by sailors). I'm fascinated by him, though, because he dabbled in world mapping, and seemed to be ahead of many of his peers on certain geographical details. No one knows where he was getting his information, or why he didn't more aggressively try to commercialize his insights.

Anyhow, I did a Google search on "Battista Agnese," which told me there were 187,000 entries. Serious Google users know those numbers are meaningless, but it's interesting that it's a relatively small number; World War II gave me 242,000,000. After five pages of results I still saw no Wikipedia entry. So I searched for Battista Agnese on Wikipedia. It told me there was no entry but I was willing to create one.

I am not. But I suspect someone is. In fact, I'm sure once a Wikipediac sees this, he'll rush to create one. Even if he has never heard of Battista Agnese, it won't be difficult to find the content to fill the entry -- after all, Google says there are 187,000 entries on him. And thus Jim's theory on derivatives, and my own experience with derivative content on Wikipedia, will continue.

Wonder how long it will take that entry to make the Top 10?

* Side note -- a collection of maps depicting the world wasn't called an atlas then. Ortelius' friend Mercator also was developing such a compilation, something never published before, but Ortelius beat him to it. (Some say Mercator let him, as Mercator was also perfecting the projection named for him that many of us stared at in school every day, where Greenland is larger than South America. Yes, it distorts land at the poles, but it allowed mariners to draw a straight path from A to B, which is helpful for sailing.) A few years after Ortelius published a collection of maps made up mostly of others' maps, Mercator published his own collection heavy with his own maps, and called it an "atlas." The name stuck.

UPDATE: A Wikipediac did in fact answer my call and post an entry on Battista Agnese, but unfortunately he plagiarized a Library of Congress page, provided no recognition of the source, and introduced errors into the entry.

UPDATE TWO: Another Wikipediac has expunged from history the plagiarized one and created a new one, whitewashing the previous transgression.

posted by Patrick Ross @ 10:08 AM | Access: Commons, Fair Use, Orphan Works, Public Domain

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