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Sum of All Knowledge: Wikipedia and the Encyclopedic Urge UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Sum of all knowledge: Wikipedia and the encyclopedic urge Salor, F.E. Publication date 2012 Document Version Final published version Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Salor, F. E. (2012). Sum of all knowledge: Wikipedia and the encyclopedic urge. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:01 Oct 2021 SUM OF ALL KNOWLEDGE Wikipedia and the Encyclopedic Urge Fethi Erinç Salor University of Amsterdam 2012 SUM OF ALL KNOWLEDGE - WIKIPEDIA AND THE ENCYCLOPEDIC URGE - ACADEMISCH PROEFSCHRIFT ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam op gezag van de Rector Magnificus Prof. D.C. van den Boom ten overstaan van een door het college voor promoties ingestelde commissie, in het openbaar te verdedigen in de Agnietenkapel op donderdag 4 oktober 2012, te 14:00 uur door Fethi Erinç Salor geboren te Ankara, Turkije Promotiecommissie Promotor: Prof. Dr. M.D. Rosello Co-promotor: Dr. J. Goggin Overige Leden: Dr. J.H. Hoogstad Prof. dr. C.P. Lindner Prof. dr. C. Lock Dr. J.A.A. Simons Prof. dr. G.E.E. Verstraete Faculteit der Geesteswetenschappen Acknowledgements Any project, regardless of merit or consequence, that spans four years is bound to accumulate dependencies. This thesis could not have been realized without the generous support of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis and its managing director, Eloe Kingma. Having worked together for six years, it would not be an overstatement to credit almost every positive development in my academic life in Amsterdam in some way to the two people who are credited as the supervisors to this project. Prof. Dr. Mireille Rosello immediately became the very model of a scholar for me during the first course in my initial master’s degree and her inquisitive, incisive and subtle approach to all matters continued to set the standard to which I aspired to achieve in all my work. Despite me entering almost all our thesis meetings with looming uncertainties and doubts, she has always managed to put me on the right track with just one or two questions of surprising briefness, disarming simplicity and yet, pinpoint accuracy. Even during my first weeks in Amsterdam, Dr. Joyce Goggin was there to support my slightly off-kilter interests among the group and ever since then she has been my constant source of inspiration for applying myself in a diversity of interests with open- mindedness and curiosity while expressing myself with clarity and verve. As the editor of my drafts, she has bared the brunt of all my struggles. Prof. Rosello and Dr. Goggin are the reason why I insist on anyone asking me advice about starting a PhD to “find a supervisor you admire and love to work with, the rest will sort itself out”. A kindred spirit and a tireless conversationalist, Esra Almas gracefully served as my sounding board for ideas over the years and provided invaluable companionship. Thijs van den Berg, in addition to being the source of many a great conversation, kindly accepted to be the editor of the Dutch summary of the thesis. Canan Marasligil transformed from being my girlfriend at the beginning of this project to being my wife at the end of it and has never yielded in her effort to make me a better thinker and to encourage me to explore the world in her incomparable way. Her drive and dedication always kept me on track and I will always be grateful for her ceaseless support and endurance for a hermetic PhD student repeatedly pestering her with quasi-interesting information and half-baked ideas. Above all, my thanks and gratitude is for my parents, whose unwavering support took all imaginable forms over the years. While they always tried their best to ensure that I am always in a position to able to achieve all I could aspire to, it was for their gentle and loving curiosity and genuine interest towards all my endeavors that I consider myself immeasurably lucky and blessed for. This is for Gülbün and Tamer Salor. I now held in my hands a vast and systematic fragment of the entire history of an unknown planet, with its architectures and its playing cards, the horror of its mythologies and the murmur of its tongues, its emperors and its seas, its minerals and its birds and fishes, its algebra and its fire, its theological and metaphysical controversies-all joined, articulated, coherent and with no visible doctrinal purpose or hint of parody. Jorge Luis Borges “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, 1941 Table of Contents Introduction 1 1. Defining the Encyclopedia 7 1.1 Introduction 7 1.2 Education, well-rounded 8 1.3 The Book of God and the Book of Nature 14 1.4 One Scribe to Bind Them All; Identifying the Pre-Enlightenment Encyclopedia 19 1.5 Scrolls and Scriptoria; Literacy and the Encyclopedia 22 1.6 A Revolutionary Construct; Understanding the Printing Press 24 1.7 Challenging a Revolution; Differing views on the Printing Press 29 1.8 Transforming Encyclopedic Thought 33 1.9 Emergence of the Modern Encyclopedia 36 1.10 Enlightening the Citizens 39 1.11 Beacons of Civilization: Understanding the Modern Encyclopedia 52 2. Imagining and Building a New Encyclopedia 57 2.1 Introduction 57 2.2 Challenging Print 58 2.3 Maintaining the Modern Encyclopedia 63 2.4 Science, Fiction and Encyclopedia 65 2.5 Understanding Media, New and Old 68 2.6 Encyclopedia Galactica vs. The Guide 73 2.7 Building the Third Revolution 77 2.8 Hypertext 80 2.9 Open-Source and Collaborative Production 83 2.10 Transcending Print 87 3. Introducing Wikipedia 91 3.1 Introduction 91 3.2 Nupedia and Origins 92 3.3 The Wiki 94 3.4 Charting the Growth of Wikipedia 96 3.5 Notable Stubs and Other Oddities: A Wikipedia Primer 100 3.6 A Bunch of Nobodies: Understanding the Wikipedia Community 106 3.7 An Encyclopedia Like No Other 114 4. Positioning Wikipedia 119 4.1 Introduction 119 4.2 Compendia of Knowledge 121 4.2.1 Knowledge on Knowledge 121 4.2.2 Treatises, Mirrors and Trees 125 4.2.3 Building Consensus 131 4.3 Authors and Authority 134 4.3.1 Authoring Authority 134 4.3.2 Philosophers, Monks and Editors 138 4.3.3 From Anons to Zealots with Barnstars 140 4.4 Organizing Principles 146 4.4.1 Medium and the Message 146 4.4.2 Scrolls, Codices and Sets 149 4.4.3 Interconnectedness of all Things 154 5. Conclusion 159 Epilogue 167 Works Cited 169 Summary 181 Nederlandse Samenvatting 183 Figures and Illustrations Figure 1 The Tree of Knowledge by Porphyry of Tyre 13 Figure 2 Didascalion by Hugh of St. Victor 17 Figure 3 Map of the System of Human Knowledge by Diderot & d’Alembert. 42 Figure 4 Growth of English Wikipedia 99 Figure 5 Consensus Flowchart by Wikipedia 104 Figure 6 Motivational factors for contributing to Wikipedia by Oded Nov 111 Figure 7 "Where Citations Come From", XKCD, Munroe, 2011 132 Figure 8 Content Listings of Wikipedia 156 Introduction On January 15th 2011 Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, celebrated its 10th anniversary. The following year, in March 2012, the publishers of the world’s oldest encyclopedia in continuous publication, the Encyclopeadia Britannica, announced that no new printings of the venerable encyclopedia will be made, marking the end of a print run that lasted more than two hundred and forty years. Since the turn of the century, the proliferation of the World Wide Web heralded an increasing number of similar disruptions. From the established models of producing and distributing recorded culture to interpersonal communications and the definition of the self, all aspects of society and culture is in a state of transition. While many bourgeoning disciplines have emerged in academic community to better the understanding of these macro and micro transformations, the cutting edge of academic inquiry often overlooks history and it is all to common for non-academic commentators to get lost in hyperbole and speculation. Wikipedia, partly due to its success and reach and partly due to its somehow arcane aspects, has been a very popular subject for both academic and non-academic inquiries since its inception. However, it is troubling to observe many, otherwise insightful, studies on Wikipedia to compare the online encyclopedia to the venerable Britannica and go on to argue for perceived differences between these two very popular works. While Britannica, and the modern encyclopedia set it exemplified, was instrumental in defining the very notion of what an encyclopedia should be for multiple generations, its long history is but a phase in the overall development of the encyclopedic ideal. The urge to create encyclopedias is as old as the recorded history and there is no question that we are living through a pivotal era of disruption concerning the manifestation of this urge.
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