What’s an Encyclopedia?

What’s an Encyclopedia?:
John Pederson asks:

You do understand that Wikipedia is less about building an encyclopedia and more about “collecting the sum of all human knowledge and making it available for free to everybody on earth”, right?

Um… aren’t those pretty much the same thing?

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yes… and no… an encyclopedia generally is about perspectives on knowledge, one of those perspectives is sort of this ‘objective framing’ of knowledge as existent outside of human minds. I think wikipedia closes some of that gap… It is very clear, much more clear to me than from a heavily edited print encyc, that wikipedia is closer to knowledge presented as a plurality of subjective processes of coming to know and its expression in the world Even if people are being projective in that way, I do not think that wikipedia objectifies the same way as print encycs and that is important.