I shouldn't complain about the over-ambitious goal, since a trivial corollary is to use the Wiki to annotate Cryptonomicon as well. Quicksilver sounds more annotation-worthy, though, like a cross between a history of science and those weird alternate-history and shadow-history books where Benjamin Franklin teams up with a young Antoine Lavoisier to stop an underground cabal of animal magnetists from Venus. Hmm, that's actually not a bad--glaaaah! Damn you, Thomas Paine, and your fiendish future-tech remote control garotte!
[0]Actually, Patrick Tufts probably set it up on his behalf.
Wed Sep 24 2003 09:41 Leonard Gets Results!:
I'm not entirely sure of the mechanism by which I get results, since to my knowledge I've never publicly announced that I think Cryptonomicon should be annotated by some well-meaning dupe. But somehow the word got through to Neal Stephenson, who has set up[0] a Wiki for his new novel, Quicksilver, complete with over-ambitious goal of replacing Wikipedia. Tying a Wiki to a popular book is a good way both to distribute the dupedom and to fight Wiki vandalism, since it ensures steady reader coverage of the footnotes (those relevant to the book, anyway) over time.
under a Creative Commons License.