A Timeline of Events

1895

¶72Otlet’s Permanent Encyclopedia: liberating ideas from the binding of books.

1936

¶73Wells’s World Brain: a vision of a worldwide encyclopedia using microfilm.

1945

¶74Bush’s memex: a vision of a hypertextual knowledge space and new forms of encyclopedias.

1965

¶75Nelson’s Xanadu: a vision of hypertext.

1971

¶76Hart’s Project Gutenberg: a vision of providing ebooks through achievable means (“plain vanilla ASCII”).

1980s

¶77Academic American Encyclopedia is made available in an online experiment; multimedia CD-ROMs soon follow.

1991

¶78Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web: a vision of highly accessible read/write.

1993

¶79Interpedia: an ambiguous vision lost among too many infrastructural options.

1995

¶80Cunningham’s WikiWikiWeb: making the Web easy to collaboratively edit.

1999

¶81Distributed Encyclopedia: many people should contribute independent essays that could be centrally indexed.

1999

¶82Stallman’s “The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource.”

2000

¶83Distributed Proofreaders: distributing the task of proofreading among many.

2000 (March 9)

¶84Nupedia launched: a FOSS-inspired expert-driven free encyclopedia.

2001 (January 10)

¶85“Let’s make a Wiki.”

2001 (January 15)

¶86www.wikipedia.com launched.

2001 (January 16)

¶87GNE Project Announced.