How Bad is Wikipedia? Codex Alexandrinus as a Test Case

There are some things I really like about Wikipedia (although I don't really buy into David Parker's view that the Bible grew like a wikipedia article). It always comes up first in a google search so it is easy to find. It sometimes has really good pictures. And it usually has a jumble of information without any real coherent flow (which I generally don't mind). And lots of sentences finish with a reference (although it is not usually to the most relevant source). But a lot of scholars apparently don't like it and won't let their students use it. So how bad is wikipedia? I find it is sometimes helpful to check as one port of call among others, when I am up-dating a lecture; just to see: a) whether some stupid new idea has come out that I should be aware of; b) whether there is something really obvious I should include in my notes for a lecture; and c) what information people can glean entirely from secondary sources without ever having necessarily studied the subject.

Anyway, I was checking the wikipedia article for Codex Alexandrinus. That is over 7,000 words and 94 notes. It is full of information, and probably would give readers a reasonable idea of the manuscript. And the problems are sometimes subtle. Like the fact that a large proportion of the scholarship cited is from the 1800s (that doesn't make it wrong, but it does make it dated). Practically every sentence is poorly expressed (and that comes from an Australian). Look at that first note to Greek Bible! But I found a load of problems. (I know it can change all the time so I'll include the relevant bits here.)

1. "Wettstein designated it in 1751 by letter A, and it was the first manuscript to receive thus a large letter as its designation." If we overlook the 'large letter', we find here a typical wikipedia problem: two true facts are brought together in a stupid edit to create a false statement. Yes Wettstein designated it as A, yes, it was the first to have such a designation. But no, the connection between these statements ("thus") is wrong. It was already designated as "A" in Walton's Polyglot in 1657.

2. "The fourth volume contains the New Testament with 31 leaves lost." This is another typical wikipedia problem - the partial evidence taken as the full picture. What is the case? Well yes 31 leaves have been lost from the New Testament; but there are also leaves missing from 1 Clement (1 leaf) and 2 Clement (probably 2 leaves), both of which are in the fourth volume (leaving aside the possibility that they might be in Codex Alexandrinus' New Testament). So at least 34 leaves are lost from the fourth volume.

3. Here we are told: "Previously, General epistles were placed before Acts of the Apostles. They changed their positions after rebinding." (on the supposed authority of Westcott). But that is not what the colophon in the photo says, rather that this brings to a close "the Acts of the Apostles and the Catholic [Epistles]". Acts can't come after the Catholic Epistles because on the same page we have the end of Acts in the first column and the start of James in the second column. In fact Westcott said no such thing as is here stated. He gave the table of contents of Alexandrinus, further confirmation against the view that the order was changed in binding. As we shall see wikipedia has a keen interest in changes brought about in the binding of this manuscript.

4. Completely disconnected things put next to each other as if they are somehow related. There is a whole section further down on Textual Features, put those "Verses the scribe did not include" down there.

5. Leaving aside the fact that this also should be down in "Textual Features", this illustrates another wikipedia problem - inability to nuance and over-confidence in what can be proven. "In the lost two leaves (John 6:50-8:52), by counting the lines, it has been proven that it was not in the book – there was not room for it". So obviously it can be shown that if the text continued as normal there would not be enough space on the two missing leaves for all the text if 7.53 - 8.11 was included. And it is reasonable to assume that this amount of text was missing, and further that these verses were the missing ones. But we can't prove it wasn't some other twelve verses, or that these verses weren't added in the margin, or weren't somewhere else in the book (maybe somewhere in Matthew!). So we should say that A probably lacked these verses (Avid as in NA).

6. This is a doozy: "... most of the folios were originally gathered into quires of eight leaves each. In modern times it was rebound into quires of six leaves each." Now this sounds plausible enough, so long as you have no idea at all what a quire is. Incidentally I was so taken by this idea I thought about showing what the result would be like (but this is taking too long already). I do know that this completely wrong (and incidentally undocumented) statement has spread from wikipedia to other places on the interweb (e.g. Orthodoxwiki and answeringchristianity and thiswikipediaripoff).

7. The ye-olde English pretty obvious plagiarism detector: "whensoever" is probably enough, but those two sentences are both very odd: "The vellum has been fallen into holes in many places" - this may have meant something in its original context, but it no longer does.

8. (It looks like I'll easily make 10). Here we have another wikipedia staple: completely irrelevant information included for no obvious reason. "Words are written continuously in a large, round and well-formed uncial hand, with no accents and only some breathings (possibly added by a later editor). The letters are larger than those of the Codex Vaticanus. There is no division of words, but some pauses are observed in places in which should be a dot between two words." (I pass over the final phrase in silence). Here is a perfectly helpful couple of sentences, along with the interjection: "The letters are larger than those of the Codex Vaticanus." Oh yeah, like we all know how large those letters are! And this matters how? And why only one comparison?

9. That same clip has a typical wikipedia doublet. In fact a double doublet:  "no accents and only some breathings (possibly added by a later editor). ... There are no accent and breathing marks, except a few added by a later hand ..." cf. also "There is no division of words, but some pauses are observed in places in which should be a dot between two words ... but the punctuation was written by the first hand." Well this one is a contradictory doublet!

10. Leaving aside the fact that the proposed change of scribe at 1 Cor 10.8 was already mentioned a few paragraphs earlier, this sentence has a rather arbitrary element: "... who had better tools for comparison...". One could say that Milne and Skeat considered Kenyon's view and found it wanting (and perhaps that they have been followed by contemporary scholars - although I doubt that is particulary relevant unless they have also checked the data); but I don't see that they had any better tools than Kenyon did. They all worked with the manuscript itself. What other tools are there?





That is ten problems in the first half of the entry. And there are many more in the second half. I can see why many people advise students to avoid wikipedia. Wikipedia is quite bad. Facts are wrong, correct facts are placed in the wrong context, incorrect conclusions are drawn. Some of these errors would seem to have been deliberately inserted (either that or very stupid people are getting things badly wrong and adding them in). The best and most recent scholarship is cited the least. Evidence is not routinely provided. And the overall style is dreadful.