User:Fdizile/All Knowladge
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The idea of compiling all human knowledge in a single work, although not in a single place, is highly seductive. In this project, we attempt to study how many articles are needed to cover the sum of all human knowledge. Currently, there are 6,817,749 articles in English Wikipedia[3] and in July 2011 there were 5,696,942 unique red links.[4] As of April 2014, Wikidata includes 14,238,904 items.[5] This page still in expansion estimates that the total notable articles figure is over 96,000,000, but new knowledge is created every year.
Estimated figure of notable articles needed to cover all human knowledge is over 104,000,000
Like all persons of the Library, I have traveled in my youth; I have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues...
Many individuals, groups and organizations have attempted to compile all human knowledge before, some examples sorted by date include: Library of Alexandria (3rd century BC) in Egypt, Naturalis Historia (AD 77–79) by Pliny the Elder, Speculum Maius (13th century) by Vincent of Beauvais, Bibliotheca universalis (1545–49) by Conrad Gessner, the abstracting and indexing project (17th century) by Gottfried Leibniz, L'Encyclopédie (1751–1772) by Diderot and d'Alembert, Mundaneum (1910) by Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine, Encyclopædia Britannica (1911) and more recently Interpedia (1993) by Rick Gates, Internet Archive (1996) by Brewster Kahle and Wikidata (2012). Also, hypothetical cases exist: Encyclopædia Galactica (1980) by Carl Sagan in Cosmos, Permanent World Encyclopaedia (1936–1938) by H. G. Wells and Memex (1945) by Vannevar Bush. Finally, there are imaginary examples too: "The Universal Library" (1901) by Kurd Lasswitz, "The Total Library" essay and The Library of Babel (1941) by Jorge Luis Borges, Encyclopædia Galactica (1942) in "Foundation" by Isaac Asimov and the Akashic records.
Furthermore, there are thousands of archives, libraries and museums all over the world preserving human knowledge in several formats: books, manuscripts, journals, newspapers, magazines, sound and music recordings, videos, play-scripts, patents, databases, maps, stamps, prints, drawings and more. Some of the largest ones are: the British Library in the United Kingdom (170 million items[6]), the Library of Congress in the United States (155 million items[7]), the Russian State Library in Russia (43 million items[8]), the National Diet Library in Japan (35 million items[9]), the National Library of China (31 million items[10]) and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (31 million items[11]).
This project is focused in those entities which are notable and deserve an article in Wikipedia. For completeness of sister projects, see #Sister projects. For an estimate about lost knowledge, see #Destroyed knowledge and Wikipedia:There is a deadline.
You are welcome to improve this page, be bold! There is available an userbox: {{User All human knowledge}}.