Hi;
Perhaps, you may want to help me compiling information about this topic and improving the estimate.[1]
There is a false sensation about Wikipedia being almost complete. In the other hand, projects like WikiSource are in their infance, for example, Internet Archive hosts about 3 million public domain books,[2] how many of them are available at WikiSource?
This project compile images for every square kilometre in Britain.[3] We can use this idea for Commons, and take thousands of millions of photos of all the world. : )
Regards, emijrp
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Emijrp/All_human_knowledge [2] http://www.archive.org/details/texts [3] http://www.geograph.org.uk/
2011/9/16 Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com
On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 12:01 PM, emijrp emijrp@gmail.com wrote:
I think that the phrase meaning refered to Wikipedia is "the sum of all human knowledge which is notable and encyclopedic".
Not ALL, ALL, ALL human knowledge. MySpace discarded.
When you look back to when that quote was issued (at least 2004), I think I tend to see it as broader and more aspirational. Wikipedia was already the biggest project, but we still imagined ourselves making a statement with Wikinews and Wiktionary and everything else. Back in the day, I can certainly imagine Wikimedia wanting to encompass all forms of human knowledge, including projects going far beyond the confines of what we now see as notable and encyclopedic. We have retreated from that quite a lot. Even within Wikipedia our notions of what was acceptable and what was not were far more fluid.
The projects have accomplished an incredible amount, and we should all be very proud and amazed at what we have done. However, I do think we have lost some of that early dream. Back in the day, it was easy to imagine that we would eventually encompass all human knowledge, and now we tend to draw our goals more narrowly. In part, I think our perceptions of that famous quote have been evolving alongside our perceptions of what Wikimedia and Wikipedia have become.
-Robert Rohde
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l