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It'll never catch on. On a more serious note, although it superficially sounds like he's talking about Wikipedia (in 1937... WHOAH) he probably isn't. The idea

It'll never catch on. On a more serious note, although it superficially sounds like he's talking about Wikipedia (in 1937... WHOAH) he probably isn't. The idea he's describing seems to be a very elite-driven technocratic idea, suffused with the sorts of imperialist ideals you'd expect an educated European in 1937 to expound.

gregw134 10y ago
You don't want to dismiss his ideas just because he came from a different time period. Is there anything specifically wrong with what he wrote?
jasode 10y ago
>The idea he's describing seems to be a very elite-driven technocratic idea Right, he imagined a top-down organization that collected and curated information for the benefit of humanity. It seems like the trigger for HG Wells imagination was the "microfilm". Using that technology, he could see how vast quantities of information (old books in worldwide collections) could be photographed, compressed into organizable filing system, and centralized in one place. The parallel of that to Wikipedia would be cheap hard drives holding terabytes of information. However, that real radical innovation with Wikipedia was the bottom-up crowdsourced contributions. People thought an encyclopedia authored by anybody without credentials would lead to useless trash. Amazingly, that prediction didn't happen. Personal anecdote.... I have contributed to several wiki articles and in one entry about a novel, I corrected a paragraph that had incorrect information. I simply rewrote the entire paragraph. At first, I thought a subsequent editor would delete it since my edit came from an anonymous contributor. (I was not logged in and only the ip address is recorded in the revision history which means it might be flagged as "drive by vandalism"). It's been several years and I occasionally revisit that page. Not only has my prominent edit stood, but others have continued working around it. It's a weird accomplishment -- a 21st century version of "Kilroy was here."
- derefr 10y ago
  What he's talking about actually seems like a sort of inevitability (which still hasn't happened yet, but will): it's basically the (technocratic, top-down) Dewey Decimal "filing" standard, but where each library has a copy of every book (and other media), instead of having to request inter-library loans. Soon enough, it won't make much sense to talk about "what's available at your local library branch", instead thinking about "what's available in The Library." Of course, most things will only be available to be borrowed digitally, but that's not usually a problem if you had a need for the information rather than a desire for the aesthetic experience of reading. (And hopefully that will include useful [e.g. 3D when necessary] digitizations of all the old documents and artefacts that are currently housed, for their own protection, in nobody-can-look-at-them archives within libraries.)
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Well Wikipedia is more curated than people really imagine. Yes, you can start writing an article on anything. But don't expect it to last long until someone comes along and flags it in violation of some guideline or other. Also, most of the more historically significant articles are padlocked. Thus not just anyone can go about editing them.

gregw134 10y ago

You don't want to dismiss his ideas just because he came from a different time period. Is there anything specifically wrong with what he wrote?

jasode 10y ago

>The idea he's describing seems to be a very elite-driven technocratic idea Right, he imagined a top-down organization that collected and curated information for the benefit of humanity. It seems like the trigger for HG Wells imagination was the "microfilm". Using that technology, he could see how vast quantities of information (old books in worldwide collections) could be photographed, compressed into organizable filing system, and centralized in one place. The parallel of that to Wikipedia would be cheap hard drives holding terabytes of information. However, that real radical innovation with Wikipedia was the bottom-up crowdsourced contributions. People thought an encyclopedia authored by anybody without credentials would lead to useless trash. Amazingly, that prediction didn't happen. Personal anecdote.... I have contributed to several wiki articles and in one entry about a novel, I corrected a paragraph that had incorrect information. I simply rewrote the entire paragraph. At first, I thought a subsequent editor would delete it since my edit came from an anonymous contributor. (I was not logged in and only the ip address is recorded in the revision history which means it might be flagged as "drive by vandalism"). It's been several years and I occasionally revisit that page. Not only has my prominent edit stood, but others have continued working around it. It's a weird accomplishment -- a 21st century version of "Kilroy was here."

derefr 10y ago
What he's talking about actually seems like a sort of inevitability (which still hasn't happened yet, but will): it's basically the (technocratic, top-down) Dewey Decimal "filing" standard, but where each library has a copy of every book (and other media), instead of having to request inter-library loans. Soon enough, it won't make much sense to talk about "what's available at your local library branch", instead thinking about "what's available in The Library." Of course, most things will only be available to be borrowed digitally, but that's not usually a problem if you had a need for the information rather than a desire for the aesthetic experience of reading. (And hopefully that will include useful [e.g. 3D when necessary] digitizations of all the old documents and artefacts that are currently housed, for their own protection, in nobody-can-look-at-them archives within libraries.)
digi_owl 10y ago
Well Wikipedia is more curated than people really imagine. Yes, you can start writing an article on anything. But don't expect it to last long until someone comes along and flags it in violation of some guideline or other. Also, most of the more historically significant articles are padlocked. Thus not just anyone can go about editing them.