No . 130 The Trusty Servant
said , ‘ the boys are far too polite to say anything , but I have just marked their dictations and they all seem to have the same two gaps in their work : I must have drifted off a couple of times and lost my place .’
I also remember a phone call that I received in the Biology lab from Eli McCullough ( HM ’ s Secretary , 56-88 ): ‘ There is a large worm in the Headmaster ’ s back passage . Could you please come and remove it ?’
Clearly , Desmond could hear this rather ambiguous request and I could hear him , in the background , laughing loudly ! By the time I arrived at the narrow passageway , the offending ‘ worm ’ ( slow-worm ?) had disappeared . I decided that further investigation of the Headmaster ’ s back passage was probably rather unwise !
Of course , I was lucky that Sir Desmond ‘ had to appoint me ’ and I learnt so much while on the job . I had no PGCE so was fortunate to be in an environment where knowledge of one ’ s subject was the key thing and you were sharing your enthusiasm with others who wanted to know . Further good fortune followed me as I arrived at Clifton in 1969 to take on a Biology department that was ready for change and where the other science departments were strong .
Wykepedia
On 21st September the front page of Wikipedia featured the ‘ List of Old Wykehamists ’. Ian Alexander ( G , 67-72 ) recounts the journey to the 13 th -most visited page on the internet :
‘ Former pupils of Winchester College are known as Old Wykehamists ’, the Wikipedia article began , not wholly unpromisingly . There followed a terrible mess , with fragmentary attempts at organisation by many hands , hardly any of it attributed to verifiable sources . But I ’ m running ahead of myself .
Henry Chichele , a technical Wykehamist whose education was probably funded by Wykeham in the 1370s
Quite exactly why I decided that it would be worth putting that particular one of over 5 million articles on English Wikipedia into order now escapes me , but along with the headache there is undoubtedly a pleasure in seeing order slowly emerge from chaos , as anyone who has worked on a project in industry , or written a book ( which can amount to the same thing ), will attest .
Wikipedia was founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger - an encyclopedia of linked pages of hypertext ( a Wiki ) that anyone could edit . By 2006 , people , almost all unpaid , had created a million articles , and Time magazine called Wikipedia the ‘ biggest and possibly the best ’ encyclopedia in the world . In 2010 English Wikipedia reached 3 million articles and Encyclopædia Britannica published its final printed edition ; it is hard not to suppose that the two facts are connected .
The idea of a book that would encompass all knowledge is centuries old . Denis Diderot ’ s Encyclopédie of 1751-1772 was modestly intended to ‘ assemble all the knowledge scattered on the surface of the earth ’. It contained nearly 72,000 articles in 17 volumes , with another 11 volumes of illustrations . It was perhaps unlucky in its timing : the Industrial Revolution created an ever-increasing flood of inventions and new technologies to be described , requiring ever more specialists to pen the articles . The Encyclopédie was accurate at the time of printing , but keeping it up to date was a Sisyphean task .
Diderot ’ s successors expanded the work to a distinctly unwieldy and extremely expensive set of some 216 volumes ( varying with the binding ) to form the Encyclopédie méthodique . In 1832 they abandoned the attempt . They would have appreciated the advantage of an encyclopedia that is constantly kept up to date , and can be read from anywhere with a mobile data signal . Anyone who has tried to browse a large printed encyclopedia knows , too , that clicking on ‘ Henry Chichele ’ is far more convenient than retrieving the ‘ Ca-Ch ’ volume and finding the right page .
Today the ‘ List of Old Wykehamists ’ covers over 350 men from seven centuries , from Archbishop Henry Chichele to the Olympic rower George Nash . It lists , too , Wykehamists who have been awarded the Victoria Cross or George Cross .
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