[Foundation-l] "All human knowledge", by Jimmy Wales (?)

emijrp emijrp at gmail.com
Fri Sep 16 20:39:53 UTC 2011


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 at gmail.com>

> On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 12:01 PM, emijrp <emijrp at 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
>
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