I stand corrected

I should always check Wikipedia before I say anything. Other people are not nearly as enamored of this online encyclopedia as I am, but I often think that 90 percent of what I've learned in the last two years has been learned through it.

In my last post, "Beer thumping with Heisenberg's ocelot," I said that It's a wonderful life has never, "to my knowledge," been recognized as a story about parallel universes (I'm becoming more careful to stipulate "to my knowledge" in making more and more statements, now that I'm beginning to realize how limited my knowledge is), and that I considered parallel universes to be very different from time travel. Upon looking up the Wikipedia article on "Parallel universe (fiction)," it turns out, not surprisingly, that I was wrong on both counts. Wonderful life is indeed mentioned under the heading of "Movies," although the writer claims that "strictly speaking, the universes aren't parallel in that they cannot co-exist; rather they oscillate between one or the other"--a rather picky distinction, in my opinion. The article also includes a large section on "Time travel and alternate history," calling it "the most common use of parallel universes in science fiction." I'm glad careful readers of my fabulously popular and articulately intellectual blog don't point out more of my stupid errors; I might become discouraged from continuing to use it to bolster my fragile ego.

What is surprising is that Wilson's Schrödinger's cat trilogy, about which I was writing as a story of parallel universes, is not mentioned in the Wikipedia article, even though the article devoted to the work itself describes the component books as "each taking place in a series of separate and slightly distinct universes." C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia is mentioned constantly (as by rights it should be), but Wilson's trilogy never once. Nor is it listed in Wiki's "List of fiction employing parallel universes" (but then, neither are the Narnia chronicles). These are two of many examples of one writer of Wiki articles not knowing what is contained in other articles, which is a common criticism of Wikipedia. Rather interestingly, Wikipedia has a large article on "Criticism of Wikipedia," and after reading it, I'm wondering why I was ever stupid enough to read so much Wiki in the first place, let alone stupid enough to go around quoting it all the time. How many sites do you know that go to such extraordinary lengths to discuss what incompetent fuckwads they are? At the beginning of this post, I said I should always check Wikipedia before I say anything. Now I'm inclined to think I'll never refer to it again.

Incidentally, a Wiki search (well, so much for sticking to the last statement) of "Parallel universe" without "(fiction)" added gives a list of articles which includes not only the one referenced above, but one on the "Many-worlds interpretation" of quantum mechanics. Needless to say, this is far too technical for a dumb-ass like me (example sentence: "Many-worlds denies the objective reality of wave-function collapse, instead explaining the subjective appearance of wave-function collapse with the mechanism of quantum decoherence."), and has nothing to do with my post on Wilson anyway.