20 volumes of keywords from A to Z
At the time, in another millennium, I wanted a conversation encyclopedia for my wedding. A gift for eternity, as I thought quite naively - the Internet was still unknown future music. In my childhood and youth, leafing through my parents' encyclopedia was one of my favorite pastimes, in which reading took a central place. Later, while studying French literature, I became acquainted with positivism, which so nicely sums up the 19th century belief in knowledge and science, at least in the Eurocentric part of the world. "Science leads to foresight; foresight leads to action," philosophized Auguste Comte (1798-1857), who decisively shaped positivism.
Collecting mania for centuries
The effort to collect universal knowledge in books is considerably older. The Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon Aller Wissenschafften und Künste, for example, appeared in the first half of the 18th century with 284,000 entries in 64 volumes on 63,000 book pages as the most comprehensive European encyclopedia at the time. Encyclopedias in Latin existed even earlier. In the early 18th century, the first knowledge collections in German were created. Their advantage was that they reached a larger audience.
From references to links
It is interesting how much all these extensive works relied on a reference structure from the beginning: The links of the book world refer to another keyword, after which it was necessary to scroll or even consult another volume. In digital times, jumping to what is referenced is easier: one click on the link, and the reading continues.
Encyclopedia of the Internet
For example, in Wikipedia, the freely accessible and voluntarily maintained Internet encyclopedia. It was founded 21 years ago and gathers an incredible amount of knowledge. The basic problem that faced the authors of the first encyclopedias remains: Which keyword is included at all, which facts are relevant? What is a fact at all? The human attempts to bring order into human chaos remain exciting.
