In which Matthew explores the unexplorable

Probably no more than a year ago:

Sunnydale is located on a "Hellmouth"; a portal "between this reality and the next", and convergence point of mystical energies...

Hogsmeade is the only settlement in Britain inhabited solely by magical beings, and is located to the north-west of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry....

Archenland is a nation to the south of Narnia. Its borders are formed by mountains to the north and by the River Winding Arrow to the south...

Now:

Sunnydale, California, is the fictional setting for the U.S. television drama Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Series creator Joss Whedon conceived the town as a representation of a generic California city...

Hogsmeade is a fictional village in the Harry Potter series of novels by J. K. Rowling...

In C. S. Lewis's fantasy novels the Chronicles of Narnia, Archenland is a nation to the south of Narnia. Its borders are formed...

It used to be common practice to enter fictional locations into Wikipedia with the same style, tone, and attention to detail as any non-fictional location. Parallel universes were presented parallel to each other, through a medium governed by consensus; no one objected to this free play of fact and fiction -- in fact, it made a pretty great read; only the extremely stupid, surely, were confused about whether Terabithia really existed.

But Wikipedia must keep up appearances. (For whom? I thought the thing was supposed to be for us, by us?) The Wikipedia: Manual of Style alerts are legion, and this one is still up on most of the sites quoted above:

This book-related article or section describes an aspect of the book in a primarily in-universe style. Please rewrite this article to explain the fiction more clearly and provide non-fictional perspective.

Follow the links. There are guidelines indeed.

The latest surge in Wikipedia's oxymoronic campaign for academic authority is not only doing damage to how research is taught and understood, but to the very idea of the Wikipedia project. At best, it produces little sound bites of backward thinking from its competitors -- see the 7 December BBC article "Students 'should use' Wikipedia" [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7130325.stm] for the full story:

Ian Allgar of Encyclopaedia Britannica maintains that, with 239 years of history and rigorous fact-checking procedures, Britannica should remain a leader in authoritative, politically-neutral information.

Good old politically neutral information. Hey, remember in the late eighties when we realized that the notion of neutral information is illusory, and often a tool of manipulation? Weren't internet-based media supposed to provide a way around that?

In the days of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Bede, Sir John Mandeville -- before guys like Ian Allgar invented truth -- encyclopedists produced compendia, chronicles; they built timelines and maps that conformed to their narratives (Jesus, Arthur, whoever) rather than empty gestures in the opposite direction.

Wikipedia once provided a frontier for the free play of information, for medieval-style historiography to grow again. This was never to the exclusion of modern academic rigor, but perhaps it rebelled a bit against the top-down control of truth, which internet-based media were supposed to help destabilize.

In its attempts to make information neutral, Wikipedia only neuters.

As we might expect from any campaign for neutral information (there have been countless such campaigns, though they never seem so neutral with hindsight), all traces of the fan-generated, playful entries are are being systematically obliterated, with no record kept. They preserved a cultural moment; they embodied material extremely important to the devotees that created them; they are being burned. As usual.

To the medievalist's eye, the fixes are still transparent in the cases of Hogsmeade, Sunnydale, Archenland, and others -- there is most often an obligatory opening sentence which ensures that "fictional" is the first word we see, but then the old article often goes on just as the superfan originally, delightfully, wrote it. But there are no Middle-Earth locations to visit on Wikipedia anymore. We must look where the censors don't think to in order to find the gems. After this:

Yoknapatawpha County is a fictional county created by American author William Faulkner as a setting for many of his novels. It is widely believed by scholars that Lafayette County, Mississippi is the basis for Yoknapatawpha County. Faulkner would often refer to it as "my apocryphal county."

We get the dear old original, in present tense, and pretty much unharmed except at the first ellipsis:

Yoknapatawpha county is located in northwestern Mississippi and its seat is the town of Jefferson... bounded on the north by the Tallahatchie River and on the south by the Yoknapatawpha River and has an area of 2,400 mi² (6,200 km²). Most of the eastern half (as well as a small part of the southwest corner) of the county is pine hill country. The word Yoknapatawpha is pronounced "Yok'na pa TAW pha." It is derived from two Chickasaw words—Yocona and petopha, meaning "split land."... Yoknapatawpha was the original name for the actual Yocona River, which runs through the southern part of Lafayette County, of which Oxford is the seat. The area was originally Chickasaw land...