This book places Wikipedia into historical context by discussing five groups, each of which had something in common with the Wikipedia project. Wikipedia is an ambitious and successful project – an online encyclopedia written by the community. When searching for Wikipedia on Google, the snippet returned by Google says: “Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”. This snippet comes from the metadata attached to the project's homepage at: www.wikipedia.org. As of December 2009, Wikipedia existed in 269 languages, with more than three million entries in English. The second largest Wikipedia was the German version with nearly one million entries. Rather surprisingly, the fourth largest Wikipedia was in Polish, with more than 600,000 entries – larger than the versions in Spanish or Russian, for example. The smallest were in the lesser‐known languages, Marshallese and Yi (also known as Nuoso), with fewer than 20 entries each.
In a 2009 appeal, Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, said: “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet has free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's where we're headed.”
Dan O'Sullivan's book is centred on this vision; he provides five historical examples, several of them intended to create ‘the sum of all human knowledge. The first example is the ancient Library of Alexandria. This project, like Wikipedia, aimed to collect all the world's knowledge in one place.
The next example is the Royal Society, founded in 1667. It was established to promote “experimental philosophy”. The Society set up a network of correspondents and the scientific journal (Philosophical Transactions) in order to disseminate the results of their experimentations – just as Wikipedia is utilising the Internet to spread knowledge.
Another ambitious project to gather all the knowledge, theoretical and practical, in one place was the French Encyclopédie, initiated by Diderot. The project took 20 years, was comprised of 17 volumes and involved hundreds of contributors. Like Wikipedia, this was a collaborative project.
One of the more interesting examples of a collaborative effort of knowledge production was the Oxford English Dictionary project. The aim of the project was not only to record the meaning of words, but their history as well. Volunteers were asked to read books and to send in on paper slips by mail examples of word usage over centuries.
The last example in the book is the Left Book Club, a project that aimed to distribute books and a journal, in order to promote Marxist socialism in pre‐war Great Britain. The founders of the group, similarly to wikipedians, tried to extend their readership.
The second part of the book discusses different aspects of Wikipedia: its aims, the community, the structure, transaction costs, its relation with the public and its basic principles. The third part concentrates on using Wikipedia to look up information and to assess its entries. There is also a chapter on contributing to Wikipedia.
I was especially impressed by the first part of the book. The specific examples were highly relevant, and provided an excellent historical context for this huge knowledge production project, the Wikipedia.
