Dan Gillmor pointed out that Wikipedia has a thorough, scholarly article on the new Pope. I can improve on that: I happened to have the Sistine-chapel webcam in a corner of the screen when the white smoke came out, and observed the Wikipedia article when it was only minutes old. At which point I noticed that a defacer with a sense of humor had inserted something about the former Cardinal Ratzinger dreaming of retiring to “a small Nazi village”, but it had been fixed by the time I got there. Just now, I decided that the phrase “Benedict XVI is the 8th German pope in history;” would be improved by losing the words “in history” so I nuked ’em. Which is to say, Dan’s got a point. I see a future in which, when you want to talk about anything worth talking about, you link either to its URI, or its Wikipedia entry, or both.
