"What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible"

The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order -- not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart's librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists -- the shopping list, the will, the menu -- that are also cultural achievements in their own right.

17.000.000 articles. 91.000 active contributors. 270 languages.

No matter what words one would choose to describe Wikipedia, numbers cannot speak but the truth: Wikipedia, which was set out as an “experiment” in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, nowadays constitutes the largest free, collaboratively authored encyclopedia in the world.

There is a more important aspect however, that numbers won’t reveal: Wikipedia stopped being an encyclopedia a long time ago. Rather, it has grown into a socio-cultural phenomenon that changed – and keeps changing- radically the way knowledge is received, produced and disseminated.

When knowledge is generated by crowds, no single individual has much personal responsibility for what is produced, but nor does any one person have a realistic prospect of shaping the outcome. With Wikipedia, the opposite is true. The fact that there is no final version means that anyone can change anything, but it also means that every given change can be attributed to a particular individual. Though it is possible, and common, to make edits on Wikipedia anonymously (by hiding behind a nickname), it is still true that someone is always responsible for everything that happens, and that someone always knows who they are. So the fact that there are no authoritative versions on Wikipedia is what makes it possible to generate a sense of personal accountability for particular entries, since any entry at any given time is the responsibility of the last person to edit it. This seems to be enough to make most people want to get it right. But it also means that those who don’t want to get it ri

I've been reading Tom McArthur's Worlds of Reference: lexicography, learning and language from the clay tablet to the computer, a history of dictionaries, encyclopedias and reference materials published in 1986. The last section, titled "Tomorrow's World" is interesting in hindsight: having looked at the major shifts that have occurred in how cultures have used lexicography, McArthur is aware that things change in unimaginable ways. He shies away from making detailed predictions about how the computer will change the dictionary or the encyclopaedia; but he does find an interesting model for how the collaborative creation of knowledge might work in the future. Because I haven't seen this mentioned online, I'll quote this at length: