User:Hansmuller/The sum of all knowledge

Jimmy Wales in the New Broadcasting House. Cellanr, Flickr september 2015.

Lecture by Katherine Maher, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, Talks at Google, 2016, pdf. "104,000,000 (notable things worth knowing)" on page 41.

    This page is related to Wikipedia:Prime objective and is a translation of the Dutch essay Wikipedia:De samenvatting van de menselijke kennis.

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 sum is understood as a literal addition or compilation, as it turns out.
  
  

Explanation

by Jimmy Wales, founder: the sum of all human knowledge means the summary of all knowledge

Asked whether he meant

1. the total of all knowledge, or
2. the summary/gist etcetera of all knowledge?

, where it was remarked that the Dutch Wikimedia chapter WMNL refers to "the whole of all knowledge" in its "Mission and vision".

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 Wikipedia:Relevance and Wikipedia: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 pdf 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. ”

Wikimedia chapter	Mission according to them	Comment
Denmark	Vi arbejder for at gøre viden fri og tilgængelig for alle, ved bl.a. at støtte op om bidragsydere på Wikipedia, ved institutionsamarbejde og kursusvirksomhed.	The Danes simply speak about "the knowledge" that must be made free and accessible to all. (For instance by supporting contributors to Wikipedia, collaborations with institutions and course teaching activities.)
France	L'objectif de l'association est de promouvoir le libre partage de la connaissance et parce que l'éducation est un besoin essentiel de notre société, nous travaillons d'une part avec ces bénévoles dévoués, et d'autre part avec les institutions et des actors de la scène politique.	The French want to promote "the free distribution of knowledge", not specifying what "the knowledge" entails. (Because education is an essential need of our society, they collaborate with both dedicated volunteers and institutions and politicians.)
Germany	Unsere Vision ist eine Welt, in der alle Menschen am Wissen der Menschheit teilhaben, es nutzen und mehren können. Or Stellen Sie sich eine Welt vor,... in der alle Menschen am Wissen der Menschheit teilhaben, es nutzen und mehren können. Das ist unsere Vision von Freiem Wissen!	The Germans emphasize the social aspect of sharing, using and increasing knowledge, not so much what the extent of that knowledge might be, simply "the knowledge of humankind".
Italy	Immagina un mondo in cui ciascuno possa avere libero accesso a tutto il patrimonio della conoscenza umana	The Italians see human knowledge as a common legacy to which everyone could have free access.
Netherlands	Stel je een wereld voor waarin een ieder vrijelijk kan delen in het geheel van alle kennis. Daar staan wij voor! Translation: Imagine a world where everyone can freely use the entirety of all knowledge. Or, succinctly, in a PR blurb: Alle kennis voor iedereen, door iedereen. Translation: All knowledge for everybody, by everybody.	The Dutch want everyone to be able to freely use all knowledge in an absolute sense.
Spain	Imagina un mundo ... en el que cada persona ... tenga acceso libre ... a la suma del conocimiento umano. Eso es lo que estamos construyendo.	The Spaniards are concerned with the free access for everyone to "the essence of human knowledge". (Spanishdict.com. Suma means combination, personification, here essence.)

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.

Word and dictionary	Meanings	Examples
Summa (Latin)
F. Muller and E.H. Renkema, edited by K. van der Heyde: Concise Latin-Dutch Dictionary, J.B. Wolters Groningen 1958, entry Summa p. 899	(Translation:) 1. highest place / priority, 2. addition, 3. whole / total, 4. main, main content, book as summary (Middle Ages).	Summa victoriae, total victory Summa epistulae, meaning of a letter. In summa, essentially, briefly and succinctly. Summa theologiae from Thomas Aquino. There was a whole genre of summa books, which kept the meaning of summary alive, hence the English meaning of the main point (essentials) adopted from Latin.
Latin-english.com	1. sum, 2. summary, 3. chief point, essence, principal matter, substance, 4. total.
Sum (English)
Merriam-Webster: sum (US)	1. an indefinite or specified amount of money 2. the whole amount (aggregate), 3. the utmost degree, 4a. a summary of the chief points or thoughts, 4b. gist, the sum and substance of an argument	The sum of human happiness, the sum of this criticism follows, that's the sum total of what I know about cars. (Book reviews: the sum of the novel, the meaning of the novel in brief.)
Sum and substance (English)
Merriam-Webster: sum and substance (US)	The general or basic meaning of something said or written.	The sum and substance of an argument. "Here we have, in two small sentences, the sum and substance of all theology". Comparison of different Bible translations of Book of Daniel 7:1: "Then he wrote down the dream and told the sum of the matter. // He wrote down the dream, and this is the summary of his account."
A. Broers, J. Smit jr. and R. Born:English-Dutch dictionary , J.B. Wolters Groningen 1963 4, p. 540		The sum (and substance) of his objections is this, (translation:) his objections boil down to this. These things made up the sum of his life, formed his entire existence.

Conclusion: the summary of all human knowledge

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.

See also

• The Transhumanist and others: Essay The prime directive, Wikipedia Signpost, 30 January 2022