FOUNDATION OF KNOWLEDGE
In the 1951, Gnome Press published a series of Isaac Asimov short stories as the novel Foundation, a work of epic science fiction set in a future universe. As a follow-up to Foundation, Asimov would go on to write three sequels and two prequels over the rest of his long, prodigious writing career in the same setting, creating one of the most enduring and influential visions of the future currently in print. Asimov was a rare creature: not only was a he a successful science fiction writer, he was also a scientist, historian, and raconteur of great renown, and his works go beyond the usual spaceships-and-lasers approach of typical space opera.
The premise of Foundation and the works that followed it is that a new branch of study, psychohistory, allows scholars to anticipate the future of human history based on mathematical analysis of huge populations. Humans as individuals are completely unpredictable, but when massed in large numbers, completely quantifiable.
As an aside for library students, the foundation in the title is one of two organizations designed to preserve all human knowledge after a psychohistorically predicted collapse in civilization; the central hub of the series, therefore, is a great library. It’s a long way from Star Wars, isn’t it?
The notion of the wiki to establish and share information is based in many ways on the same concept. Individual experts may be very knowledgeable, but will always have inherent bias, limited points of view, and a reliance on such individuals will lead to an unevenly curated information source.
So the wiki is predicated on the simple concept that two minds are greater than one, and therefore millions more minds are exponentially greater yet. Wikis allow the greater public to compose, edit and share their insight to the world, and as Asimov foresaw in Foundation, relying on a greater mass of people creates predictability and reliability.
Of course, some subjects are so obscure and little known that it takes a long time for even this system to fulfill its potential. One such subject — close to my heart — is the life of John Vance Cheney (1848-1922), a poet and librarian and the subject of my ongoing thesis. He already had a Wikipedia page a long time before I settled on him as a subject of historical inquiry, but it was slight (a stub, in Wiki nomenclature), and had a noteworthy error that shortened his influential tenure at the Newberry Library in Chicago by ten years.
That was the first element I corrected — some weeks ago — and in the last day I’ve revised and expanded his page in a couple more ways and added him to the category “American Librarians”. However, in so doing, I was very wary of not crossing the “original research” line that Wikipedia insists upon; I only used information available in a published biographical entry on his life (a source I added as a citation to the page), rather than the more extensive information I have in my research that cannot be easily cited.
My edits (four) appear as “dsronline” on February 19th in the 0:00 hour (though it was the 18th Pacific Time).
