Happy Wikimas

A portmanteau entry. First item: in Nature, a study is reported according to which, in the sciences at least, Wikipedia is not significantly more inaccurate than the Britannica (4 errors per article versus 3; the basis is 42 articles sent out by Nature for blind review by experts). Wikipedia is currently raising funds. There are of course more urgent needs in this season. I mention Wikipedia because it is free and open to all. It is not only an instrument for the dissemination of knowledge but also a tool for social justice, to help ensure that the door to knowledge doesn’t require wealth to open.

Second item: a quotation from an article on the Merry Christmas brouhaha. See “Grinch identified” and “Whichmas? Thatmas!” for other items of interest.

The saddest part of all is that the offended Christians would be satisfied by so shallow a gesture as this simple phrase. We used to think that putting the Christ back in Christmas meant that Christians would stop being so materialistic and focus on what the birth of Jesus meant for their lives and how we might bring peace to the world! None of us thought it meant putting the word Christ back in junk mail circulars and forcing unsuspecting sales clerks to wish us a “Merry Christmas.”

Opinions have differed, to say the least, on the celebration of the nativity of Christ. Here is Edmund Calamy, one of the “Westminster Divines”, preaching in 1644:

This day is commonly called The Feast of Christ’s nativity, or, Christmas-day; a day that has formerly been much abused to superstition, and profaneness. It is not easy to say, whether the superstition has been greater, or the profaneness…. And truly I think that the superstition and profanation of this day is so rooted into it, as that there is no way to reform it, but by dealing with it as Hezekiah did with the brazen serpent [II Kings 18:4]. This year God, by his Providence, has buried this Feast in a Fast, and I hope it will never rise again.

It happened that in 1644 Christmas coincided with the monthly fast day (which occurred on the last Wednesday of each month), and so the question arose of which was to take precedence. The Parliament ordered that the fast should be kept (Neal 2:284–285; Coleman n.19).

Imagine that: fasting on Christmas.

Jim Giles, “Internet encyclopaedias go head to head”, Nature 14 December 2005; doi:10.1038/438900a. [Subscription only]

The Rev. Madison Shockley, Bah Humbug to You Too!, Truthdig Dec. 14, 2005.

On the celebration of Christmas in seventeenth-century England and eighteenth-century America, see Chris Coldwell, “The Religious Observance of Christmas and ‘Holy Days’ in American Presbyterianism”; originally published in The Blue Banner 8.9–10, September/October 1999. Coldwell’s source for the sermon by Edmund Calamy is James Reid, Memoirs of the Westminster Divines (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1982; reprint of 1811) 186. See also Daniel Neal, The History of the Puritans (London, 1837).