This is my first draft of an essay about the joy of holding a papery wikipedia in my hands, turning the pages, exploring the knowledge buried in volumes of books. Papery books. I’m talking about an artifact in the real world that is at risk of passing into obscurity: the encyclopædia (“encyclopedia” for the Neanderthals who only read ASCII). I challenge you to do your part to show the world that the encyclopædia is alive and well. Please bear with me. I hope my story inspires you to act. My call to action follows the story.
I visited a professor of library science in the Kraemer Family Library at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs (UCCS). I wanted to see his collection of encyclopedias. It is dwindling. He showed me rows of empty shelves and told me that his undergraduate students, when told about encyclopedias, ask, “What is that? Is it like Wikipedia?”
No! An encyclopædia is not much like Wikipedia. I’m telling you this based on my authority as a Wikipedian who was there at the beginning. I joined the project in 2001, the year Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales co-founded it, when it was running the UseModWiki software. Our little group of Wikipedians was tight. We all “knew” each other, though “know” was only what we wrote on Wikipedia and on the mailing list. Before Wikipedia, as I came to know in 2001, Jimmy aspired to create a free encyclopedia named Nupedia, and he hired Larry to be its Editor in Chief. Nupedia withered; Wikipedia flourished—the monster of Dr. Larry Frankenstein, taken over by Jimmy after Larry departed. (To give credit where credit is due, Jimmy, from the beginning, was Larry’s boss and Wikipedia’s benefactor and sponsor. But Larry was the community organizer who got the project off the ground and shepherded it until income concerns, mostly, and wolves in sheep’s clothing biting him in the arse, to some extent, led him to walk away entirely. He eventually declared himself the project’s ex-founder.) The free wiki, posing as an encyclopedia, overshadowed and defeated the free encyclopedia. Wikipedia was also a bellwether of the demise of most print encyclopedias. The formidable Encyclopædia Britannica announced in 2012 that it would cease print publication, adapting to the desires of the first generation raised on Wikipedia, who expected their “encyclopedia” to live exclusively online.
Okay, I’ve told you how I really feel. This is only a blog post, not a thoroughly thought-out essay.
The final part of my story involves a company bold enough to publish a papery wikipedia in 2026. Earlier this year I stumbled on a set of new World Book Encyclopedias at the San José Calabazas Branch Library—in California, of all places. Who knew Californians read encyclopedias?! (Just joking. I’m a nominal Californian. As much time as I’ve been spending here lately, I should claim residency. But I digress.)
Here is my photo album featuring this delightful artifact: Encyclopedia. I started by looking up Wikipedia in Vol. 22, the index. It referred me to the Encyclopedia entry, so I opened “E Volume 6” to “Encyclopedia” on p. 265. The article runs four pages. I enjoyed capturing a digital facsimile of a physical artifact. Now I can visit this little part of the book anytime I wish. From anywhere. What a world we live in!
I started the album a few months ago. I added the final page today. And this final page in the album is the setup for my call to action. I used random.org to generate a number between 1 and 22 (the number of volumes). I got 17, the S–Sn volume. Then I got 278, a random page between 1 and 542. The articles on p. 278, as you see in the facsimile, are Second Amendment; Secord, Laura Ingersoll; Secret Police; Secret Service, United States; and Secretary-bird. What a delight, reading the entire page! Then I made a digital facsimile. Now, you, go and do the same. Find a set of encyclopedias. The set doesn’t even have to be recent. Pick a random volume and a random page of the volume, and make your own digital facsimile of it after reading it. Your life is now richer than it was, and I bet you know something now that surprised you when you learned it. I learned that Canadians honor their own hero of the War of 1812, Laura Secord. (This fact, by the way, may serve me well if I ever compete on Jeopardy!) Then tell me: What did you learn?
