L’Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751-1772) was a major contribution to Enlightenment civil society. Not only did it contain much knowledge (and maybe a dose of wisdom), but it specifically expanded civil rights and liberties by promoting classical liberal positions contrary to absolute monarchism, the army, and the church. It had 28 main authors, brilliant philosophes including Voltaire and Diderot, most of whom were amateurs in the sense that they were not paid to write–but they were a privileged and exceptional few. By my calculation, a new copy of the multi-volume first edition (beautifully bound in leather and illustrated) cost about as much money (456 livres) as an unskilled laborer earned in 16 months of work. The French Encyclopedia included many ground-breaking, highly original and even iconoclastic articles that changed disciplines and are still read today

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, has about 318 times more articles and roughly 85,000 active contributors. It is completely free for anyone with Internet access, and it expands freedom not because of a particular editorial commitment to liberal values, but because it is a massive, uncensored, public forum. Although it was set up for traditional encyclopedia articles, users now create live news pages as well. For example, as Clay Shirky notes, the terrorist bombings in London in 2005 were tracked in real time on a Wikipedia page created within minutes of the first explosion.

Wikipedia announces, “Visitors do not need specialized qualifications to contribute. Wikipedia’s intent is to have articles that cover existing knowledge, not create new knowledge (original research). This means that people of all ages and cultural and social backgrounds can write Wikipedia articles. Most of the articles can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet, simply by clicking the edit this page link. Anyone is welcome to add information, cross-references, or citations, as long as they do so within Wikipedia’s editing policies and to an appropriate standard.”

Wikipedia and other peer-produced forms of knowledge demonstrate that sheer numbers of people can generate knowledge of great value. The value that they create is different from the contributions of the philosophes who wrote the Encyclopédie. I’m not sure there is a common coin with which we can compare the two, yet Wikipedia is certainly worthy of being named alongside the Encyclopédie. As proof, consider that the Wikipedia article about the Encyclopédie is itself a really good read.

There are also some interesting similarities. Although editors of the French Encylopedia chose authors, and Wikipedia is wide open, a Power Law applies in both cases–the most prolific 10% of authors contribute the majority of the content. In the former case, a man called “Louis de Jaucourt … wrote 17,266 articles, or about 8 per day between 1759 and 1765.” He sounds much like one of the dedicated enthusiasts who produces a vast supply of Wikipedia entries and keeps the whole thing alive.

My first blog post was on January 8, 2003. Since then, I have rather obsessively posted every single work day (except when we’ve been on family vacations). The archives of this blog have accumulated 1,377 posts and 969,405 words.

I try not to be self-referential, but once a year, on my “blogday,” I reflect a little about this forum. In 2009, the big change was my decision to have each post automatically reprinted on Facebook (and, later, tweeted on Twitter). I’ve enjoyed the Facebook feed because it’s an unobtrusive way to tell people about new posts; and then it’s easy for them to comment or show that they “like” something I’ve written. I now direct people who want to comment on my blog to my Facebook page. I also waste a whole lot of my own time on Facebook ….

I don’t think the content of my blog changed appreciatively during its seventh year. I wrote somewhat less about electoral politics and young voters, because there was no national election. I still tried to serve up a mix of news from the field of civic engagement, reflections on current events, some philosophy, some arts, and a bit of light verse.

In 2009, there were 83,800 visits to the main blog page. That doesn’t count people who read the blog on Facebook or via RSS feeds. The number of visitors was almost exactly the same as in 2008, but there are huge seasonal variations. I know from seven full years of experience that I always get many more visitors in the spring and fall than in the winter and summer. November is typically the peak month, especially when an election draws people interested in youth voters. In November 2008, there were 13,186 visits to the main page, or 440 each day. The daily average for the year 2009 was just 230.

Would-be bloggers shouldn’t seek my advice, since I’ve never built a large audience myself. But for what it’s worth, I would advise thinking about your archive as much as your current posts. After a while, you will build up quite a store of text that search engines index. If you blog about only current events, your archive will be swamped by unimaginable quantities of other people’s writing. No one finds my old posts about Bush and Kerry by Googling for those search terms. But if you blog about somewhat offbeat topics, your archive becomes a store of accessible material. I guess that 80% of visitors to my website do not look at my post of the day, but rather arrive at an old post via a web search. Of late, they have been looking for Nabokov heroines, my late friend Cole Campbell, what parents want for their children, and the Spanish Renaissance painter Juan Sánchez Cotán. I am happy to oblige such tastes.

In an era of obvious technological change, we tend to overestimate the impact of new technological tools and overlook innovations in the humanities. The classic example is the Gutenberg Revolution. Supposedly, the invention of movable type, which lowered the cost of reproducing documents, shattered the control of the hierarchical Catholic Church and permitted Protestant reforms such as the translation of the Bible into vernacular languages.

I’ve argued before that this history is mistaken. To recap the main points: The Bible was translated into vernacular languages many times during the Middle Ages. Translation was allowed and even strongly encouraged by some leading thinkers. Erasmus, a Catholic, a critic of Luther, and an adviser to popes, wrote a manifesto in favor of translation: “I would to God, the plowman would sing a text of the scripture at his plowbeam, and that the weaver at his loom, with this would drive away the tediousness of time. I would the wayfaring man with this pastime, would express the weariness of his journey.” His was not a radical position but had much medieval precedent.

Today, Catholicism has a reputation for opposing translation because after the Protestant Reformation, at the Council of Trent, the Church adopted that position. The story is not: 1) the Church opposes translation; 2) Gutenberg invents movable type; and thus 3) translation occurs. It is rather: 1) The Church generally encourages translation, 2) Gutenberg invents movable type, which is helpful to Protestant pamphleteers and translators who make specifically Protestant translations of the Bible; so 3) after 150 years, the Church bans translation.

But why were translations fairly rare and unimportant in the Middle Ages and then extremely influential and controversial in the Renaissance? The reason is innovation, but not a new technology. In the Middle Ages, the best way to read and discuss the Bible was to use the Latin Vulgate edition, originally translated by Saint Jerome. That was because Latin was a living, vital language, very widely taught and understood by literate people, and shared by Europeans from Iceland to Sicily. Also, the Vulgate was a good edition, made by a great scholar directly from Greek and Hebrew. Very few medieval Europeans knew Greek, let alone Hebrew, and they had poor or inconsistent texts of the Bible in those languages. Before it was possible to make a good translation into, say, English, they needed to invent Greek and Hebraic scholarship. Thus Erasmus, in his argument for translating the Bible into the vernacular, cites the “new and marvelous kind of learning” that has made this possible. He was talking about what we call the Renaissance, not the printing press.

Another change happened simultaneously that was just as important: the vernacular languages became worthy tools for translation. At first, in the wake of the Roman Empire, there were no languages like English, French, Dutch, Spanish, German, or Italian. There were rather local dialects of Latin or German that were different from village to village and had fairly rudimentary vocabularies. That is one reason that not only scholars, but merchants and minor officials, learned Latin from a young age–it was a better means of communication than their birth tongues. To create a real language took deliberate work. Literary authors had to develop vocabularies, often borrowing from ancient languages, and their works had to achieve wide renown so that the languages could unify. For instance, Dante helped to create Italian by writing so well in his own Florentine dialect, by borrowing thousands of Latin words, and by being so widely imitated throughout the peninsula.

Thus the story is not: 1) The Church kept the Bible under wraps by banning translations; 2) the printing press expanded freedom; so 3) the Bible was translated. It is more like this: 1) People used the Bible in Latin because that was the easiest and best language; 2) Modern languages developed as a result of literary and scholarly work; 3) Scholars learned Greek and Hebrew and created reliable editions of the original scriptures; 4) Martin Luther, John Wykliffe, and others were in a position to make vernacular translations, which, in turn, helped to form modern German, English, and other languages. I think all of this would have happened without Gutenberg, because the Renaissance was already well underway when he started printing around 1439.

The moral is to pay more attention to the growth of scholarship and literature when trying to explain great changes in society–not only in 1510, but five centuries later.

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