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E-book Wikipedia @ 20 : Stories of an Incomplete Revolution

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Penilaian

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Twenty years ago, Wikipedia set out on its path to provide humanity with free access to the sum of all knowledge. Even if this is a mission that can’t be finished, Wikipedia has made remarkable progress toward the impos-sible. How so? Wikipedia is an encyclopedia built on a wiki. And never has an application (gathering the sum of human knowledge) been so suited to its medium (easily interconnected web pages).Encyclopedias have long been reliant on interconnections. In 1755, the Encyclopédie’s Denis Diderot wrote that the use of cross- references (or renvois) was “the most important part of our encyclopedia scheme.”1 This feature allowed the Encyclopédie’s editors to depict the connective tissue of Enlightenment knowledge and to dodge state and church authorities by way of facetious and satirical references. For example, they linked to arti-cles on the Christian rite of communion, wherein “the body and blood of Christ” is consumed, from the article on “Cannibals.”At the onset of each new informational medium— from paper, to micro-film, to silicon— connectivity was the impetus. Among the documental-ists of the early twentieth century, there was Wilhelm Ostwald’s Brücke, a bridge, and Suzanne Briet’s indice, an indicator. Such documentalists advanced indexing and classification schemes to improve interconnections between information. Then, on the cusp of the digital age, Vannevar Bush famously wrote of the power of an electromechanical memex laced with “associative trails.”2 This inspired the hyperlinks of the 1960s and the URLs of the 1990s.Creating HTML web pages interspersed with links, however, is not so easy; the first wiki was launched in 1995 to fix this. To create and link to a new page, you simply wrote the page’s title in CamelCase, so- called because capitalizing “camel” and “case,” when conjoined, has two humps. Your lumpy title is now a link that, when clicked, takes you to a fresh page awaiting new content.Wikipedia, then, appeared in 2001, almost by way of accident.3 Efforts at collaboratively creating an online encyclopedia had faltered for years. When a wiki was added to one such project, as an experimental scratchpad, it took off beyond anyone’s expectation: Wikipedia was born.Just as the history of two centuries, from print to digital, reveals the importance of connection— call it a reference, bridge, indicator, trail, or link— Wikipedia’s two decades are also a story of connection. The following essays speak of and exemplify those connections across disciplines and bor-ders, across languages and data, and across the professional and personal.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

020 AYE w

Penerbit

London : The MIT Press., 2020

Deskripsi Fisik

377 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780262538176

Klasifikasi

020

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

-

Subjek

Library and Information Sciences

Info Detail Spesifik

-

Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

-

Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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