World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopædia (1937)
sherlock.ischool.berkeley.edu
sherlock.ischool.berkeley.edu
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On a more serious note, although it superficially sounds like he's talking about Wikipedia (in 1937... WHOAH) he probably isn't. The idea he's describing seems to be a very elite-driven technocratic idea, suffused with the sorts of imperialist ideals you'd expect an educated European in 1937 to expound.
Right, he imagined a top-down organization that collected and curated information for the benefit of humanity. It seems like the trigger for HG Wells imagination was the "microfilm". Using that technology, he could see how vast quantities of information (old books in worldwide collections) could be photographed, compressed into organizable filing system, and centralized in one place.
The parallel of that to Wikipedia would be cheap hard drives holding terabytes of information.
However, that real radical innovation with Wikipedia was the bottom-up crowdsourced contributions. People thought an encyclopedia authored by anybody without credentials would lead to useless trash. Amazingly, that prediction didn't happen.
Personal anecdote.... I have contributed to several wiki articles and in one entry about a novel, I corrected a paragraph that had incorrect information. I simply rewrote the entire paragraph. At first, I thought a subsequent editor would delete it since my edit came from an anonymous contributor. (I was not logged in and only the ip address is recorded in the revision history which means it might be flagged as "drive by vandalism"). It's been several years and I occasionally revisit that page. Not only has my prominent edit stood, but others have continued working around it. It's a weird accomplishment -- a 21st century version of "Kilroy was here."
Soon enough, it won't make much sense to talk about "what's available at your local library branch", instead thinking about "what's available in The Library."
Of course, most things will only be available to be borrowed digitally, but that's not usually a problem if you had a need for the information rather than a desire for the aesthetic experience of reading.
(And hopefully that will include useful [e.g. 3D when necessary] digitizations of all the old documents and artefacts that are currently housed, for their own protection, in nobody-can-look-at-them archives within libraries.)
Yes, you can start writing an article on anything. But don't expect it to last long until someone comes along and flags it in violation of some guideline or other.
Also, most of the more historically significant articles are padlocked. Thus not just anyone can go about editing them.
The Memex was more of a personal brain, which still sounds amazing to me.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4xe2k1/chamber...
https://archive.org/stream/chambersencyclo00unkngoog#page/n1...
TL;DR: The British publishers of Chamber's Encyclopaedia were outraged to find subtantial and ideological edits to numerous articles within their encyclopedia.
I found the topic of particular interest as the first article listed as among those changed was among the topics I was hoping to see detailed in the publication.
There's some additional history (I'm in the midst of compiling more background), but the fact that the American publisher was backing economic viewpoints strongly opposed to those gaining the upper hand in Britain may just possibly have had something to do with this.
Isn't "decentralized Wikipedia" just the WWW?
Marshall: Whats that?
Ted: A 1986 world book encyclopædia. Just the one I grew up with.
Marshall: An encyclopædia?
Ted: [laughing] Oh! You think it should be pronounced encyclo-pee-dia. I'ts a common mistake. But if you look at that squished together "ae" symbol in this here encyclopædia, you'll learn that it's a ligature derived from the Anglo-Saxon rune ash...
[shelf breaks and falls]
Marshall: You know, you're gonna have to pædia for that.