[Foundation-l] A prerequisite for the neutral, notable sum of all human knowledge

[Brian J Mingus]

The WMF mission is to provide free knowledge to the world. Wikipedia, in
particular, hopes to summarize all notable topics into a neutral sum.

Accomplishing this goal means Wikipedia an the WMF will have to evolve.
Consider the implications of the mission: Every single work that contains
notable topics must have complete coverage in Wikipedia. While every article
need not cite every work, every article must accurately summarize every
notable opinion of every notable topic in every work.

Some have interpreted the role of the proposed citations project as one of
merely centralizing the citations that already exist in Wikipedia. The
mission, however, calls for a broader vision. This new project should have a
bibliography of all works since that is the scope of the mission. The nature
of knowledge further calls for us to understand the links between items
containing knowledge, their categorical context and their abstract
relationships. This broad, unambiguous view of works and their topics will
allow us to explicate them neutrally and select only the most notable ones
for inclusion. It will, in the limit of time, prevent our judgment from
being clouded by the limited, local view of knowledge that we currently
have.

The proposed new project has the following features: It is a bibliography of
all kinds of works that fall under the umbrella of the WMF mission. Works
and collections of works contain disambiguating user contributed text and
media. Works can link to other works. Works come together to form
categories. People can use this site as their personal bibliography,
encouraging participation of a much greater community of users and curation
of the bibliography them.

There are many challenges to creating a project of such scale, but in order
to accomplish our goals of freeing knowledge we must strive to collect it
and understand it in a more nuanced way than we currently are.

Brian Mingus
Graduate student
Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab
University of Colorado at Boulder