pneumatics at 10 Downing St

In reading through the fascinating Talk page of the pneumatic tube Wikipedia entry the other week I came across this intriguing addition from a Wikipedian, from Peter Stothard's Thirty Days: An Inside Account of Tony Blair at War. It was a description of the underground Foreign Office (compared by him to the White House Situation Room):

Six small offices are connected by low corridors, stained white walls and scuffed blue floors that need the attentions of Ecovert and Hetty. The mood is more military than diplomatic. A young team of shift-workers, operating both encrypted computers and antique compressed-air communication tubes, gathers intelligence, turns it into memoranda and tries to make sure that the right people read it.

The Wikipedian proposes that the tubes were used in the 10 Downing Street Complex as late as the first half of 2003. In The Official History of Britain and the European Community, Stephen Wall also writes of a pneumatic tube system which ran between 10 Downing St and the Foreign Office. These stories add to the intrigue of pneumatic tube implicated in the transportation not only of lovers' secrets, but politicians' as well.

Image from onaquietday.org.

wikipedians working on the tubes

One of the most popular websites for pneumatic tubes must surely be Wikipedia - it certainly comes up as number one on my Google searches. While information on Wikipedia was once scorned as inaccurate, nowadays it is increasingly becoming the "go to" site for most people who want to find information on anything. Indeed research has shown that Wikipedia is not significantly any more inaccurate than the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Because of the work of many editors and bots, the information can be considered thoroughly reviewed, with errors supposedly picked up very quickly. So, who are these people "behind the scenes" of this ubiquitous internet site?

Early wikipedia adopters were mainly an elite group, however since 2006 the number of novice users increased steadily, gradually forming a Wikipedia community. Sociologists such as René König and Christian Pentzold have studied the practices of Wikipedians very closely, if you are interested in learning more about them. Their work led me to wonder who might be the pneumatic tube Wikipedians?

I have found one so far (and would love to know of any others out there!): Lyle Zapato, who writes about his additions to the pneumatic tube Wikipedia site, on a co-authored blog ZPi (see also his Inteli-Tube Pneumatic Tube proposal). On ZPi Lyle Zapato talks about clarifying ambiguous statements and adding pictures. He also moved a misplaced paragraph and created a separate section on pneumatic tubes in fiction. 

For those interested in the backstage of Wikipedia you can see the Pneumatic Tube page in process by comparing L.Z's original fiction paragraph to the one now on Wikipedia, which has been expanded by other pneumatic enthusiasts to include works by Umberto Eco and Douglas Adams, as well as references to Ghostbusters and videogames. For an even sneakier peak behind the scenes check out the "Talk page" (that other little clicked tab on any Wikipedia article) to see discussions about terminology, better references, and keeping the fiction section to wikistyle.