User:Hansmuller/The sum of all knowledge

This page is related to Prime objective Founder Jimmy Wales once helped the Wikipedia movement to a mission statement and slogan about what we want: "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."


 * But The sum of all human knowledge, what might this mean? To many speakers of English as a second language it is understood as a literal addition or compilation, as it turns out.

by Jimmy Wales, founder: the sum of all human knowledge means the summary of all knowledge
Asked whether he meant , where it was remarked that the Dutch Wikimedia chapter WMNL refers to "the whole of all knowledge" in its "Mission and vision".
 * 1) the total of all knowledge, or
 * 2) the summary/gist etcetera of all knowledge?

Jimmy Wales replied on July 3, 2015: Definitely my meaning is "summary". I wouldn't say "gist" as that word tends connote something about vagueness. But Wikipedia literally can't contain all knowledge for a number of reasons. And an encyclopedia is not, for example, a text book. And our entry on "China" for example really shouldn't be 10,000 pages long. It should provide a summary of what is known, and refer people to other sources to dig deeper. Where to stop is of course a very interesting question subject to thoughtful discussion - and of course Wikipedia can be (and is) much more comprehensive than traditional encyclopedias.

He repeated this in a interview (at 5:25) in 2015: ..we want to be the sum of all human knowledge - the sum meaning “summary” .. So "the sum of all knowledge" is "the summary of all knowledge". Unlike sum, the word summary is unambiguous also to speakers of English as a second language.

by Katherine Maher, WMF Executive Director: the sum of all human knowledge means 104 million topics
The executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) Katherine Maher in 2016 gave a Google Talk about Wikipedia appropriately titled "The Sum of All Knowledge" at Google LLC at their base in Menlo Park, California. She recommended a concrete interpretation as calculated by User:Emijrp and arrived at about 104 million separate encyclopedic topics and thus separate Wikipedia articles. User:Emijrp had researched in detail how many separate topics are worth knowing, relevant (notable) and having enough reliable, independent sources - compare Relevance and Notability.

User:Emijrp continued his project and wrote on one of his user pages on May 10, 2020: In this project, we attempt to study how many articles are needed to cover the sum of all human knowledge. As of 10 May 2020, English Wikipedia has 6,075,124 articles and Wikidata includes 27,721,774 items. This page, still in expansion, estimates that the total notable articles figure is over 104,701,020.

On the authority of User:Emijrp, Maher put it in 2016 like this: If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone [wikipedia] article or list. .... Notable things. Every major work of art, village, every scientific discovery, book ever written, every animal or plant that has lived, every notable human .... 17 million notable humans. 104,000,000 notable things worth knowing.

This means that by the "sum of all knowledge" Maher means a summary of human knowledge that amounts to traditional encyclopedic knowledge, basically just like in the old paper reference books. (See also the of her talk, page 41, below the blue figure on the right of this page.)

Interpretations by some European Wikimedia Chapters
Let's take a look at how various organisations in the Wikimedia movement deal with Jimmy Wales' the sum of all human knowledge, starting with the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) itself, in a slightly different wording: Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in 'the sum of all knowledge'. That's our commitment.

Dictionaries for the sum
The word sum occurs in various forms in Western European languages ​​(English: the sum, French: la somme, Italian: la summa, Spanish: la suma and so on), and is derived from Latin. There the noun summa means, among other things, explicitly a numerical addition, but also the abstract notion of the purport or substance of something. English has inherited this ambiguity. Let's see what dictionaries say.

Jimmy Wales means the summary of all knowledge
Above we saw that Wales clearly indicated in written word and audio on a video that the "sum of all knowledge" as far as he was concerned - who can know this better? - means the "summary of all knowledge".

WMF suggested some 104 million encyclopedic topics in 2016
The director of the WMF Katherine Maher stated in 2016 that WMF in practice envisioned the sum of all knowledge - the relevant topics for Wikipedia - as some 104 million classic encyclopedic topics, ideally resulting in the same number of separate Wikipedia articles.

Capture all knowledge?
Most national Wikimedia chapters generally avoid - including the Spaniards with their suma - a too literal and apparently incorrect translation. Sum (here) = summary, the main thing and so on, just not "the whole thing of all .. ") Most chapters describe their objective in general terms, such as "the knowledge", "to participate in knowing"), without committing, like the Dutch, to a clearly unachievable absolutist goal: the totality of all human knowledge, i.e., the "brain content" of all dead and living people, say using a fictitious Google MindView?

Not harmful
Then there is the consideration that we do not want to spread harmful knowledge through Wikimedia, for example how to make poison gas or a nuclear bomb (beyond stating mere scientific principles), so in that respect too "access to all human knowledge" cannot be intended. Distribution of Hitler's book Mein Kampf is forbidden in the Netherlands (although there is now a permitted scientific "critical" edition by the way), but that book still belongs to "all knowledge". Would we want the bare text on Wikisource? Not so, if only because of its blatant anti-semitism. Some knowledge of hacking might be obvious to Wikimedians, yet we don't want to spread any practical tips about this. With the contents of a well-stocked kitchen cupboard it is possible to produce an explosive, but we do not want to discuss this on Wikipedia: so we do not desire or promote access to all knowledge.

Worth knowing
Much of our knowledge, the craziest detailed and also most personal things, is absolutely not worth knowing or notable to others, as Katherine Maher would say, on the contrary you don't want to know ! There is a lot of detailed, for example local knowledge possible, but in English with '' the sum of .. '' apparently it is all about the main point, the summary as Jimmy Wales said, the main line or core and so on.