Circling the Infinite Loop, One Edit at a Time Seriality in Wikipedia and the Encyclopedic Urge

The idea that knowledge can be bound up and contained, A to Z and cover to cover, betrays a desire for comprehensiveness. The encyclopedic urge, as I will argue in this chapter, can be characterized by the struggle between a desire for completeness and an awareness of the impossibility of this ideal. Initially, encyclopedias were published in volume form. Such early encyclopedic efforts made rhetorical appeals to the idea that the text contained within these volumes represented the entirety of human knowledge and needed no revision or addition. Later encyclopedias began to confront their epistemological limitations, resorting to serial publication not simply as a publishing strategy, but as an acknowledgement that shifting categories of knowledge demanded a more responsive, iterative approach. Ever since the Enlightenment, compilers and editors have suggested that the incompleteness of the encyclopedia can be mitigated by serial production, a form that enables any shortcomings to be remedied in future installments. These installments also suggested a moment of encyclopedic completion that was constantly deferred, creating a tension between the epistemological urge to collect all knowledge and the deferral of completeness inherent to serialized publication.