My friend and I used to have a game where we would try to identify the best sentences on Wikipedia. The key to a typical good Wikipedia sentence is restraint and details. The prose is direct, often declarative. It is unadorned—or almost. It is bedazzled with specificity. The very best sentences may have a flat affect, but they are generous—even gratuitous—in the details.
For example, perhaps you can guess who this entry is about, but regard the poetry and pathos: “The following night, she shaved her head with electric clippers at a hair salon in Tarzana, Los Angeles.”
It is the details, their precision and strangeness, that make it sing. Electric clippers. Tarzana. These are details with purpose and surprise. This information has no pretense to necessity. But that’s just it: They are a gratuity. The Wikipedia scribes have no obligation to give them to us, and so we receive them as gift. They are the warp and weft of the story.
Prosecutors are good at this, too. Here is the Department of Justice on the country singer David Allan Coe, when he got busted for tax evasion:
In approximately May 2009, Coe stopped receiving these payments by wire into his personal bank account after receiving correspondence from the IRS as to his current outstanding tax liabilities. This action prevented the IRS from levying his bank account to pay his income taxes. The remaining balance of the concert fee was to be paid in cash only, by 3:00p.m. on the day of the concert, with no $50 dollar bills allowed as Coe believed they were bad luck and would not gamble with them.
This detail about the $50 bills is not, strictly speaking, germane. But who can deny that it is essential to understanding the shenanigans of Coe?
“This is an interesting planet,” Marilynne Robinson wrote. “It deserves all the attention you can give it.”
I have more to say about all this, but let’s get back to Wikipedia sentences. In an otherwise rich entry, sometimes the trick is tone. Information itself can be a rich detail in its own right. Regard this punctuative, delightful notation about terminology: “Hiccups lasting longer than a month are termed intractable.” Indeed.
Deadpan may be the default style of encyclopedia writers, but it takes a real grace to translate flatness into a funny-because-it’s-true zinger. A perfect introduction, for example: “A breast-shaped hill is a hill in the shape of a breast.” Indeed again.
Sometimes it’s just a matter of rhythm, or diction. On dandelions: “The beak breaks off from the achene quite easily, separating the seed from the parachute.”
If you find a good one, write it down. Wikipedia sentences are impermanent. New edits come in, like fresh snowfall covering precious tracks. In time, your favorite sentence may be buried. Like this couplet, discovered in September 2018, since lost to updates: “After a year, Vallance and Howie reunited in a Lowe's hardware store parking lot. Surprised to see each other in a different country, they decided to spend time together.”
A few exquisite Wikipedia sentences, extant as of this morning, all of which succeed in their own way:
Contrary to common lore, these were not made of wood, but of metal, ivory, bone, animal teeth, and human teeth possibly obtained from slaves.
Clocks run slower in deeper gravitational wells.
Following a 1984 study on “Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts,” exaggerated claims spread concerning the number of deaths by falling coconuts.
However, Trio preferred the name Neue Deutsche Fröhlichkeit, which means “New German Cheerfulness,” to describe their music.
Usually, the phrase “dying from laughter” is used as hyperbole.
The unusual appearance of this egg-laying, duck-billed, beaver-tailed, otter-footed mammal baffled European naturalists when they first encountered it, and the first scientists to examine a preserved platypus body (in 1799) judged it a fake, made of several animals sewn together.
His headstone at Pope Cemetery reads:
THE ONE AND ONLY
WANKARD POOSER
SHE LOVED ME, TOO
SEPT. 27, 1893
FEB. 22, 1978
(TO BE CONTINUED)At the height of Kissinger’s prominence, many commented on his wit.
Each single flower in a head is called a floret.
But there can only be one sentence that is the very best Wikipedia sentence of all. I have a nominee, which I came across in October 2019 and remains intact: the penultimate sentence in the entry on Aimo Allan Koivunen, a Finnish solider during World War II who was the first soldier known to have overdosed on methamphetamines during combat.
Koivunen was born in 1917. During the Continuation War, when the Finns allied with the Nazis to fight the Soviets, he was assigned to a ski patrol on April 20, 1944. There’s a cheap drug joke there, but let’s move on, it gets better.
In March, the patrol was attacked in Lapland by the Soviets, who moved to surround them. Koivunen and his patrol fled, skiing through the deep snow, with the Soviets in hot pursuit. Koivunen led the way, cutting tracks for the rest of the patrol.
As it happens, Koivunen had the patrol’s entire supply of Pervitin, a methamphetamine developed by the Nazis that had been issued by the Finnish army. The idea was to help the soldiers stay awake while on duty. Koivunen had been a skeptic of the uppers but as he grew tired, he grew desperate. He retrieved the package, but as he continued to ski for his life, it was difficult to retrieve a single pill in his clunky mittens. He took them all.
Wikipedia informs us: “Koivunen became fatigued after skiing for a long distance, but could not stop.” This comes before he downed the amphetamines, so I think this means that he didn’t want to stop for fear of being captured. But maybe the situation was that once he took the amphetamines, he just couldn’t stop skiing. In any event, he started skiing faster. He had taken thirty pills of pure methamphetamine. His vision became blurry and he became delirious. Initially, his patrol kept the pace with him as he skied faster and faster. At some point, he lost consciousness, but kept skiing in a blackout state. He woke up the next morning. He was alone, and all of his gear was gone, save for the skis. He had traversed 100 kilometers. He still felt peppy. He kept skiing.
Lots of exploits follow and it’s hard to know what to believe given the delirium described above: he escaped the Soviets once again, set fire to a Soviet camp, and got wounded by a land mine.
Eventually, he was discovered hiding in a ditch, Wikipedia informs us: “Having skied more than 400 km (248.5 mi) he was found and admitted to a nearby hospital, where his heart rate was measured at 200 beats per minute, which is double the average human heartbeat, and weighing only 43 kg (94.8 lbs).”
And then this phenomenal closer:
In the week that Koivunen was gone, he subsisted only on pine buds and a single Siberian jay that he caught, and ate raw. He was found, and survived, until he died in 1989 at the age of 71.
Watch how the details—the gratuities—cascade and become more and more specific: “he subsisted only on pine buds and a single Siberian jay that he caught, and ate raw.”
That is perfect music.
postscript: Siberian jays are omnivorous, Wikipedia informs me: “occasional food items include eggs of small birds, tit nestlings, snails, slugs, small mammals and lizards.”
Love this, David. I used to have to write incident reports at my library job, and my goal was always to write them in this style. I'm going to have to spend more time on Wikipedia...
Koivunen's story reminded me of a Norwegian folktale in which an aspiring dance fiddler encounters a spirit near a waterfall who promises to give him magical powers that will make him the best dance fiddler in the land. In return, the fiddler must promise to return to the waterfall daily and bring human food for the spirit's consumption. The fiddler agrees, gains the magical powers, and delights the dancers with his prowess. But one day the fiddler forgets to return to the waterfall. Taking revenge, the spirit punishes the fiddler by making him play the fiddle continuously until he exhausts himself and dies.