World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopædia (1937)
sherlock.ischool.berkeley.edu
World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopædia (1937)
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Re: World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopædia (1937)
#2It'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.
Re: World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopædia (1937)
#3This just reminded me of the joke from HIMYM:
Marshall: Whats that?
Ted: A 1986 world book encyclopædia. Just the one I grew up with.
Marshall: An encyclopædia?
Ted: [laughing] Oh! You think it should be pronounced encyclo-pee-dia. I'ts a common mistake. But if you look at that squished together "ae" symbol in this here encyclopædia, you'll learn that it's a ligature derived from the Anglo-Saxon rune ash...
[shelf breaks and falls]
Marshall: You know, you're gonna have to pædia for that.
Re: World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopædia (1937)
#4Are there any projects to build a decentralized Wikipedia? Perhaps using ipfs or similar technology. I did some brief searching but couldn't find anything. It would be a great step forward to ensuring we have a permanent indestructible knowledgebase anyone can access.
Re: World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopædia (1937)
#5Are there any projects to build a decentralized Wikipedia? Perhaps using ipfs or similar technology. I did some brief searching but couldn't find anything. It would be a great step forward to ensuring we have a permanent indestructible knowledgebase anyone can access.
> Are there any projects to build a decentralized Wikipedia?
Isn't "decentralized Wikipedia" just the WWW?
Re: World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopædia (1937)
#6It'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.
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?
Re: World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopædia (1937)
#7Oh, this is HG Wells. I was thinking of Vannevar Bush's Memex from 1945 when I saw the title.
Re: World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopædia (1937)
#8It'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.
>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."
Re: World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopædia (1937)
#9Are there any projects to build a decentralized Wikipedia? Perhaps using ipfs or similar technology. I did some brief searching but couldn't find anything. It would be a great step forward to ensuring we have a permanent indestructible knowledgebase anyone can access.
Wikipedia at least does offer full content torrents now & again so the internet can back up their work or have local mirrors, which would make it survive catastrophic failure of Wikipedia itself.
Re: World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopædia (1937)
#10It'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.
>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 fi…
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.)