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"If the government participates in such an opus, it will not get done. It should use its influence only to favor its execution. With a single word, a monarch ca

by btown 10y ago

"If the government participates in such an opus, it will not get done. It should use its influence only to favor its execution. With a single word, a monarch can make a palace arise from the grass; but a society of men of letters is not like a herd of manual laborers. An encyclopedia cannot be ordered up. It is a labor that must be doggedly pursued rather than launched energetically... The more abstract the topic, the more we must strive to make it accessible to all readers... Such are the principal thoughts that came to my mind with regard to the project of a universal and analytical dictionary of human knowledge; its possibility, its purpose, its materials, the general and particular ordering of those materials, the style, method, references, nomenclature, the manuscript, the authors, the censors, the editors, and the typographer." The translated full text [0] of that Diderot quote is pretty incredible. Two centuries prior to Wikipedia, he predicted many of the benefits and challenges of such an endeavor. I can only imagine his reaction if he were to see Wikipedia today; I imagine it would be something like [1]. [0] http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=did;view=text;rgn=main;idno=did2222.0000.004 http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=did;view=tex... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubTJI_UphPk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubTJI_UphPk

dredmorbius 10y ago
Thanks for that. I'd only run across the fragment from which I'd quoted above, and even that is tremendously informed,sightful, and illuminating. I've been digging into the history of information and communication (and only just scratched the surface of THoI website), including the explosion and dynamics of information as it spread across Europe. There's a paper which looks into the total number of books (volumes in total, not simply titles), from about 600 AD through 1800. That grows from perhaps 30,000 volumes -- about 1 per million inhabitants -- to nearly 1 billion in 1800. The 15th century, with the invention of Gutenberg's press is an absolute watershed, and the consequences, social, religious, political, scientific, are immense. I'm starting to wonder just what the hell it is we're unleashing with the Internet and in particular the Internet in your Pocket, across the world. Not all the previous developments have been postive.

by btown 10y ago

dredmorbius 10y ago

Thanks for that. I'd only run across the fragment from which I'd quoted above, and even that is tremendously informed,sightful, and illuminating. I've been digging into the history of information and communication (and only just scratched the surface of THoI website), including the explosion and dynamics of information as it spread across Europe. There's a paper which looks into the total number of books (volumes in total, not simply titles), from about 600 AD through 1800. That grows from perhaps 30,000 volumes -- about 1 per million inhabitants -- to nearly 1 billion in 1800. The 15th century, with the invention of Gutenberg's press is an absolute watershed, and the consequences, social, religious, political, scientific, are immense. I'm starting to wonder just what the hell it is we're unleashing with the Internet and in particular the Internet in your Pocket, across the world. Not all the previous developments have been postive.