{"id":14701,"date":"2013-10-15T15:54:18","date_gmt":"2013-10-15T19:54:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2013\/10\/15\/14701.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T19:06:24","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T00:06:24","slug":"lists-in-the-wiki-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2013\/10\/15\/lists-in-the-wiki-age\/","title":{"rendered":"Lists in the Wiki Age"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I know the purpose of these lists is to troll for arguments, but seriously, Business Insider<\/cite>? The Most Famous Book Set In Every State<\/a> and the Arizona book is The Bean Trees<\/cite>? Amazon Best Sellers Rank 105,267? Worldcat shows 4,443 libraries holding it… that’s not bad, actually. My immediate reaction was that Waiting to Exhale<\/cite> was much, much more famous, but Worldcat only as that at 3,600 libraries and Amazon ranks it at 144,034. On the other hand, Waiting to Exhale<\/cite> was a bestseller and had a number one movie; I’m inclined to call that one for Terry McMillan.\n

Except that there’s The Andromeda Strain<\/cite>. Bestseller, movie, miniseries. And, I think, more instantly recognizable than either. And a higher Amazon rank. So I think that about wraps it up.\n

The thing is that I got The Andromeda Strain from a Wikipedia list of Novels Set in Arizona<\/a>; I had forgotten that the town wiped out by the satellite crash is in Arizona. Much of the action is in Nevada (or in outer space), but the whole set-up is in the Grand Canyon state, so it should count if The Bean Trees<\/cite> does.\n

And here’s the thing about Wikipedia—I figured they would have such a list, and they do. It’s not comprehensive, but the most well-known books will be on it, and that’s what Business Insider<\/cite> was going for in the first place. Which makes their list not only wrong, but trivially wrong, almost uninterestingly wrong. It’s like a lmgty<\/a> situation, isn’t it? The most well-known novel set in Arizona? Why bother coming up with stuff, it’s on Wikipedia.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger can’t really make the argument that The Monkey Wrench Gang<\/i> is better known than the others. Still, I’d heard of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[202],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-item"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14701"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14701\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16649,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14701\/revisions\/16649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}