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Episode Summary
In March 1759 the French King's Council explained why it was banning a book. Not because it was useless or full of errors, but because, once finished, it would be "a complete dictionary and a general treatise of all the sciences", and so "far more sought after by the public and far more often consulted". The work was dangerous because it would be useful. The book was the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert. What made a reference work so threatening?
In this episode we follow the Encyclopédie from a Paris bookseller's plan to translate an English dictionary, a plan that ended with the bookseller and his translator exchanging punches, to 28 folio volumes and about 74,000 articles published over 21 years. We look at how it organised knowledge: a famous tree of memory, reason and imagination, borrowed from Francis Bacon and quietly rearranged so that theology sat under reason; an alphabet that actually ordered the book; and some 61,700 cross-references that Diderot hoped could "secretly overturn" opinions nobody dared attack openly. The editors themselves called their tree partly arbitrary, one map among as many as there are projections of the globe. We ask who could actually afford it (a full set cost about 65 weeks of a skilled artisan's pay), what it said about crafts, authority, slavery and women, and why it was banned twice, condemned by the Pope and, most effectively, cut in secret by its own publisher. Then we follow its design to Britannica and Wikipedia, where the links can finally be counted, and most of them are rarely clicked.
Key Topics Covered
- Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia (1728): two folio volumes held together by cross-references, and the promise that such a work "would answer all the Purposes of a Library, except Parade and Incumbrance"
- The 1745 contract to translate Chambers into French, the fistfight between the bookseller André-François Le Breton and the translator John Mills, and the court case that followed
- How a translation became a new work: the two editors appointed in 1747, aged 34 and 29, and the 1750 Prospectus with its verdict that "Chambers read books, but he scarcely saw any craftsmen"
- Ten volumes promised by December 1754, twenty eight delivered by 1772
- The scale: 17 volumes of text, 11 of plates, about 74,000 articles, about 22 million words, about 140 identified authors, and why the often quoted 72,000 is an older count
- The Chevalier de Jaucourt, who wrote about one article in four with six or seven secretaries, thirteen or fourteen hours a day
- Neither the first nor the largest: Pliny, Isidore of Seville, Vincent of Beauvais, the Yongle Encyclopedia, Bayle, and Zedler's German Universal-Lexicon with nearly four times as many entries
- How the word "encyclopaedia" was coined by Renaissance humanists from a corrupted Greek phrase, and meant education long before it meant a book
- Too many books: Ann Blair's history of early modern information overload, and why it fuelled ever larger reference works
- The tree of knowledge: Bacon's three faculties of memory, reason and imagination, reordered, with theology placed under reason on the same branch as superstition and black magic
- The plagiarism charge by the Jesuit Berthier in the Journal de Trévoux, and why the quarrel was about how much was owed to Bacon, not about concealment
- D'Alembert's world map: as many systems of knowledge as there are projections of the globe, and Diderot's admission that arbitrariness cannot be banished
- Robert Darnton's reading of the tree as an exercise of power, and the editors' own, epistemological reason for it
- Why the book was alphabetical, and the three devices meant to rejoin alphabet and system: the tree, the subject labels and the cross-references
- Subject labels in practice: some 2,600 to 2,900 distinct classes, most of them not on the tree at all
- Diderot's theory of cross-references, from showing how subjects connect to quietly undermining "ridiculous opinions"
- The satirical reference from CORDELIERS to Capuchon, and Diderot's own unease with such references
- A myth retired: "Cannibals, see Eucharist" was written by a doctor of theology, explains a pagan slander against the early Christians, and was never cited by Diderot
- Diderot's admissions: missing, useless and false references, and articles "by turns dwarfs and giants"
- What the network looks like today: 61,700 cross-references, no centre, two "hemispheres" joined on the sparsest map by a single link between chemistry and physics, and polemical arguments hidden under the harmless label "Grammar"
- The Encyclopédie's links compared with Wikipedia's: more often across disciplines, where Wikipedia's are more deeply disciplinary
- Why a tree and links: hierarchy helps recall, and structure helps newcomers most, though the editors' design was argued, not tested
- The mechanical arts: Diderot in the workshops, draughtsmen sent to draw at the workbench, and the Patte affair over the Académie des sciences' plates
- Questioning authority, cautiously: ÉCLECTISME, the motto "Everything must be examined", AUTORITÉ POLITIQUE and its obedient ending, and REPRÉSENTANS
- Knowledge made public, not knowledge made cheap: Diderot against an encyclopedia locked in the monarch's library
- Slavery and race argued on both sides of the same work: Jaucourt's articles against slavery and the slave trade, an article copied from a commercial dictionary that listed prices per person, and Diderot's HUMAINE ESPÈCE, which repeated Buffon's racial hierarchy while concluding that humanity had a single origin
- Women in the Encyclopédie: four articles on FEMME, no known woman author of any text, one woman engraver, the salon hostesses who governed the conversation, and the unsupported story of Madame Geoffrin's rescue money
- The price in labour: 280 livres promised, 980 paid, about 65 weeks of a skilled artisan's pay, and who actually bought it
- Print runs, cheaper reprints in quarto and octavo, and Daniel Mornet's study of 500 private library catalogues
- The suppressions: Diderot held at Vincennes in 1749, the abbé de Prades affair, the 1752 ban on two volumes, d'Alembert's resignation, the 1759 revocation of the licence, and Pope Clement XIII's order to burn copies
- Why "the Church" is the wrong word: Jesuits, Jansenists, the Sorbonne, the Parlement and the Pope acted separately and often against each other
- Malesherbes, the director of the book trade who protected the work he was meant to police, and Roger Chartier's warning that repression was still real
- The publisher's knife: Le Breton's secret cuts to the last ten volumes, Diderot's furious letter, and the surviving proofs of 46 uncensored articles
- Voltaire's story of a supper at Trianon, a fable
- A "revolution in minds"? What Diderot hoped in 1762, and what historians from Mornet to Chartier, Darnton, Kafker and Goodman conclude
- The successors: Britannica's attack on the alphabet in 1768, the Encyclopédie méthodique, Coleridge's "accident of initial letters", and the end of Britannica in print
- Wikipedia: Jimmy Wales's promise of "the sum of all human knowledge", its size in 2026, the accuracy studies, and why people read it
- How readers use the links: most are rarely clicked, clicks cluster at the top of the page, most reading sessions are a single page, and about one page view in 300 leads to a click on a source
- Encyclopedias shape what people know: a randomised trial with chemistry articles, and city articles and tourism
- Falling page views, AI search summaries and an AI-written rival, and the questions of 1751 that return with them
Researchers Mentioned
- Robert Darnton : The Business of Enlightenment (1979), the publishing history of the Encyclopédie, its prices, print runs and buyers; and "Philosophers Trim the Tree of Knowledge" (1984), the reading of classification as power
- Roger Chartier : The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution (1991), the argument that the Revolution "made" the books, and the study of Le Breton as censor (2011)
- Daniel Mornet : the study of 500 private library catalogues (1910) and Les Origines intellectuelles de la Révolution française (1933)
- Frank Kafker : The Encyclopedists as a Group (1996), and the finding that the roughly 140 authors were not a party
- Dena Goodman : The Republic of Letters (1994), the salons and correspondence of the Enlightenment, and the women who governed its conversation
- Andrew Curran : The Anatomy of Blackness (2011), on how the same work condemned slavery and spread racialised natural history
- Ann Blair : historian of early modern reference books and information overload, and of the word "encyclopaedia"
- Douglas H. Gordon and N.L. Torrey : The Censoring of Diderot's Encyclopédie and the Re-established Text (1947), from the proofs Gordon bought in 1933
- Gilles Blanchard and Mark Olsen : counted and mapped the 61,700 cross-references (2002)
- R. Morrissey, G. Roe and colleagues (ARTFL, University of Chicago) : the digital Encyclopédie, and machine learning and topic models of its classes
- M. Leca-Tsiomis and colleagues (ENCCRE, Académie des sciences) : the collaborative critical edition and its notices on the work's origins, authors and plates
- R.J. Heuser, M. Algee-Hewitt and J. Bender : compared the knowledge networks of the Encyclopédie and Wikipedia (2015)
- G.H. Bower and colleagues : the 1969 experiment in which hierarchies more than tripled recall
- H. Potelle and J.-F. Rouet : how hierarchical maps, network maps and alphabetical lists affect readers with little or much prior knowledge (2003)
- Jimmy Wales : founder of Wikipedia, and the 2004 promise of free access to "the sum of all human knowledge"
- J. Giles : the 2005 Nature news investigation comparing Wikipedia and Britannica
- M. Mesgari and colleagues : the systematic review of 110 studies of Wikipedia's content (2015)
- P. Singer, R. West, J. Leskovec and colleagues : why people read Wikipedia, and how they find their way through it
- D. Dimitrov, D. Lamprecht, M. Strohmaier and colleagues : which Wikipedia links get clicked, and where on the page
- T. Piccardi and colleagues : how rarely readers click on citations, and how short reading sessions are
- N.C. Thompson and D. Hanley : the randomised trial showing that Wikipedia shapes scientific writing
- H. Triedman and A. Mantzarlis : a comprehensive analysis of Grokipedia (2025 preprint)
Key Studies and Sources
- Diderot, D., and d'Alembert, J. le R. (Eds.) (1751 to 1772). Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. 17 vols. of text and 11 vols. of plates. Paris: Briasson, David, Le Breton, Durand (vols. 8 to 17 under the imprint "Neufchastel: Samuel Faulche", 1765).
- ARTFL Encyclopédie, ed. R. Morrissey and G. Roe, University of Chicago: https://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/
- ENCCRE, Édition Numérique Collaborative et CRitique de l'Encyclopédie, Académie des sciences: https://enccre.academie-sciences.fr/encyclopedie/
- d'Alembert, J. le R. (1751). Discours préliminaire, Encyclopédie vol. 1, with Diderot's "Explication détaillée du système des connoissances humaines". English: Schwab, R.N., with Rex, W.E. (trans.) (1963). Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot. Bobbs-Merrill.
- Diderot, D. (1755). "Encyclopédie." Encyclopédie, vol. 5, 635 to 648A.
- Michigan Collaborative Translation Project. The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert. English translations of individual articles: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/did/
- Diderot, D. Lettres à Sophie Volland (10 November 1760; 26 September 1762) and letter to Le Breton (12 November 1764). In Œuvres complètes, ed. J. Assézat and M. Tourneux, vols. XVIII and XIX. Garnier, 1876.
- Arrêt du Conseil d'État, 8 March 1759. In Assézat-Tourneux, vol. XIII.
- Clement XIII (1759). Brief condemning the Encyclopédie, Rome, 3 September 1759.
- Chambers, E. (1728). Cyclopaedia: or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. 2 vols. London.
- Bacon, F. (1605). The Advancement of Learning.
- Blair, A. (2003). "Reading strategies for coping with information overload, ca. 1550-1700." Journal of the History of Ideas, 64(1), 11 to 28.
- Blair, A. (2013). "Revisiting Renaissance encyclopaedism." In J. König and G. Woolf (Eds.), Encyclopaedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance, 377 to 397. Cambridge University Press.
- Darnton, R. (1979). The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775-1800. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
- Darnton, R. (1984). "Philosophers trim the tree of knowledge: The epistemological strategy of the Encyclopédie." In The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, 191 to 214. Basic Books.
- Darnton, R. (1995). The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France. Norton.
- Kafker, F.A. (1996). The Encyclopedists as a Group. SVEC 345. Voltaire Foundation.
- Mornet, D. (1910). "Les enseignements des bibliothèques privées (1750-1780)." Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, 17, 449 to 496.
- Mornet, D. (1933). Les Origines intellectuelles de la Révolution française (1715-1787). Armand Colin.
- Chartier, R. (1991). The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution. Trans. L.G. Cochrane. Duke University Press.
- Chartier, R. (2011). "L'éditeur comme censeur: Le Breton et l'Encyclopédie." Histoire et civilisation du livre, 7, 179 to 190.
- Goodman, D. (1994). The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment. Cornell University Press.
- Curran, A.S. (2011). The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment. Johns Hopkins University Press.
- Gordon, D.H., and Torrey, N.L. (1947). The Censoring of Diderot's Encyclopédie and the Re-established Text. Columbia University Press.
- Blanchard, G., and Olsen, M. (2002). "Le système de renvois dans l'Encyclopédie: une cartographie des structures de connaissances au XVIIIe siècle." Recherches sur Diderot et sur l'Encyclopédie, 31 and 32, 45 ff.
- Horton, R., Morrissey, R., Olsen, M., Roe, G., and Voyer, R. (2009). "Mining eighteenth century ontologies: Machine learning and knowledge classification in the Encyclopédie." Digital Humanities Quarterly, 3(2).
- Roe, G., Gladstone, C., and Morrissey, R. (2016). "Discourses and disciplines in the Enlightenment: Topic modeling the French Encyclopédie." Frontiers in Digital Humanities, 2, 8.
- Heuser, R.J., Algee-Hewitt, M., and Bender, J. (2015). "Knowledge networks, juxtaposed: Disciplinarity in the Encyclopédie and Wikipedia." Digital Humanities 2015, Sydney.
- Bower, G.H., Clark, M.C., Lesgold, A.M., and Winzenz, D. (1969). "Hierarchical retrieval schemes in recall of categorized word lists." Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 8(3), 323 to 343.
- Potelle, H., and Rouet, J.-F. (2003). "Effects of content representation and readers' prior knowledge on the comprehension of hypertext." International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 58(3), 327 to 345.
- Amadieu, F., van Gog, T., Paas, F., Tricot, A., and Mariné, C. (2009). "Effects of prior knowledge and concept-map structure on disorientation, cognitive load, and learning." Learning and Instruction, 19(5), 376 to 386.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1st ed., 3 vols. (1768 to 1771). Edinburgh: Bell and Macfarquhar. Vol. 1, Preface.
- Bosman, J. (2012). "After 244 years, Encyclopaedia Britannica stops the presses." New York Times, 13 March 2012.
- Wales, J. (2004). "Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales responds." Slashdot, 28 July 2004.
- Giles, J. (2005). "Internet encyclopaedias go head to head." Nature, 438, 900 to 901.
- Kräenbring, J., et al. (2014). "Accuracy and completeness of drug information in Wikipedia." PLoS ONE, 9(9), e106930.
- Rector, L.H. (2008). Reference Services Review, 36(1), 7 to 22.
- Mesgari, M., Okoli, C., Mehdi, M., Nielsen, F.Å., and Lanamäki, A. (2015). "'The sum of all human knowledge': A systematic review of scholarly research on the content of Wikipedia." Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 66(2), 219 to 245.
- Singer, P., Lemmerich, F., West, R., Zia, L., Wulczyn, E., Strohmaier, M., and Leskovec, J. (2017). "Why we read Wikipedia." Proceedings of WWW '17.
- Dimitrov, D., Singer, P., Lemmerich, F., and Strohmaier, M. (2017). "What makes a link successful on Wikipedia?" Proceedings of WWW '17.
- Paranjape, A., West, R., Zia, L., and Leskovec, J. (2016). "Improving website hyperlink structure using server logs." Proceedings of WSDM '16.
- Lamprecht, D., Lerman, K., Helic, D., and Strohmaier, M. (2017). "How the structure of Wikipedia articles influences user navigation." New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 23(1), 29 to 50.
- Piccardi, T., Redi, M., Colavizza, G., and West, R. (2020). "Quantifying engagement with citations on Wikipedia." Proceedings of The Web Conference 2020.
- Piccardi, T., Gerlach, M., Arora, A., and West, R. (2023). "A large-scale characterization of how readers browse Wikipedia." ACM Transactions on the Web, 17(2).
- West, R., and Leskovec, J. (2012). "Human wayfinding in information networks." Proceedings of WWW 2012, 619 to 628.
- Thompson, N.C., and Hanley, D. (2017/2018). "Science is shaped by Wikipedia: Evidence from a randomized control trial." SSRN working paper 3039505.
- Hinnosaar, M., Hinnosaar, T., Kummer, M., and Slivko, O. (2023). "Wikipedia matters." Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, 32(3), 657 to 669.
- Khosravi, M., and Yoganarasimhan, H. (2026). "Impact of AI search summaries on website traffic: Evidence from Google AI Overviews and Wikipedia." arXiv:2602.18455 (working paper).
- Triedman, H., and Mantzarlis, A. (2025). "What did Elon change? A comprehensive analysis of Grokipedia." arXiv:2511.09685 (preprint).
Key Numbers to Remember
- 5 March 1745 : the date Le Breton signed to publish a French translation of Chambers
- 13,459 headwords and 39,367 cross-references : Chambers's Cyclopaedia of 1728, the model
- 34 and 29 : the ages of Diderot and d'Alembert when they became editors in October 1747
- 10 volumes by December 1754, for 280 livres : the 1750 Prospectus's promise
- 28 volumes in 21 years : 17 of text (1751 to 1765) and 11 of plates (1762 to 1772)
- About 74,000 articles, about 22 million words, about 18,000 pages of text, about 2,580 plates : the scale
- About 140 : identified authors of text
- About 17,400 : articles by the Chevalier de Jaucourt, roughly a quarter of the whole and about half in the last volumes
- 30,000 to 33,000 : unsigned articles, 40 to 45% of the total
- About 80,000 livres against up to 2.5 million : what Diderot earned over the whole project, and what the four publishers may have cleared (a contested figure from lawsuit papers)
- About 284,000 : entries in Zedler's German Universal-Lexicon, nearly four times the Encyclopédie's
- 22,937 chapters in 11,095 volumes, less than 4% surviving : the Yongle Encyclopedia, completed in 1408
- 2,600 to 2,900 : distinct subject labels actually used, against a tidy tree
- More than 13,000 : articles labelled geography, the most frequent class
- 61,700 : cross-references, carried by about 23,000 articles (31%)
- 568 against 158 words : the average length of articles with and without cross-references
- 124 : cross-references in the record holder, CHÂTELET DE PARIS
- One link : between chemistry and physics, joining the two "hemispheres" of the sparsest map of the cross-references
- 61 against 30 : grammar articles carrying the natural-law topic, against articles in its own class
- 73.0 against 20.6 words : first-trial recall of 112 words arranged in hierarchies against the same words in random order (Bower et al. 1969)
- 544 of "six cens" : plates actually checked by the Académie's commissioners, against the six hundred their certificate cleared in 1760
- 980 livres : what a subscriber had paid for the full set by 1772
- 65, 26 and 17 weeks : a skilled artisan's pay needed for the folio, the quarto and the octavo
- 4,225 : copies of the first edition, for about 4,000 subscribers
- About 24,000 copies, at least 11,500 in France : all editions before 1789
- 15 of 253 : merchants among the named subscribers in Franche-Comté
- 73 of 500 : private library catalogues containing the Encyclopédie, against 288 for Bayle's Dictionnaire and one for Rousseau's Contrat social (Mornet 1910)
- 7 February 1752, 8 March 1759, 3 September 1759 : the suppression of two volumes, the revocation of the licence, and the papal condemnation
- 72 livres : the repayment per subscription ordered in July 1759
- 383 people, 40% : those sent to the Bastille for book offences in 1750 to 1779, and their share of its prisoners
- 46 articles : preserved uncensored in the surviving proofs
- 100 weekly parts, 3 volumes, £200 : the first Britannica, 1768 to 1771, and its compiler's fee
- 8,000 of 12,000 sets, against 120,000 in 1990 : sales of the last printed Britannica, against its US peak
- 7,252,881 : articles in English Wikipedia on 14 October 2026; about 68.5 million across 348 language editions
- About 28,800 : registered editors who made five or more content edits to English Wikipedia in September 2026
- 162 against 123 : errors, omissions or misleading statements found in 42 Wikipedia and Britannica science articles (Giles 2005, a news investigation)
- 99.7% accurate, 83.8% complete : Wikipedia's pharmacology articles (Kräenbring et al. 2014)
- 39%, 38%, 21% : readers who came to Wikipedia for an overview, to check a fact, or for depth, among 29,372 surveyed
- About 4% of about 340 million : links in English Wikipedia clicked at least ten times a month
- 66% : of 800,000 links added in February 2015 that were not clicked once in March
- 17% of the links, about a third of the clicks : the opening section of a Wikipedia article
- 68 to 78% : reading sessions that consist of a single page
- About 1 in 300 : page views that lead to a click on a cited source
- 4 against 3, and 54% : median clicks on completed human paths against the shortest path in a navigation game, and the share of games abandoned
- About 8% : the fall in English Wikipedia's human page views, reported for 2025 and again in our count for January to September 2026 (bot-detection rules changed over the period)
- About 5% : the cut in English Wikipedia's search traffic one working paper attributes to Google's AI Overviews
- 56%, and 5.4% against 2.9% : Grokipedia articles adapted from Wikipedia, and its citations to sources Wikipedia rates generally unreliable, against Wikipedia's own
Memorable Quotes
"[Such a work] would answer all the Purposes of a Library, except Parade and Incumbrance."
Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia (1728), Preface
"Chambers read books, but he scarcely saw any craftsmen; yet there are many things one learns only in workshops."
Prospectus of the Encyclopédie (1750)
"One can therefore imagine as many different systems of human knowledge as there are world maps of different projections."
d'Alembert, Discours préliminaire (1751)
"It is therefore impossible to banish arbitrariness from this great first division."
Diderot, ENCYCLOPÉDIE, vol. 5 (1755)
"They will set notions against each other, contrast principles, and attack, shake and secretly overturn some ridiculous opinions that one would not dare insult openly."
Diderot on cross-references, ENCYCLOPÉDIE, vol. 5 (1755)
"Here we are bloated and exorbitant; there thin, small, mean, dry and emaciated ... by turns dwarfs and giants, colossi and pygmies."
Diderot on the unevenness of the Encyclopédie, ENCYCLOPÉDIE, vol. 5 (1755)
"Everything must be examined, everything stirred up, without exception and without sparing anyone's feelings."
Diderot, ENCYCLOPÉDIE, vol. 5 (1755), on the old rules of the literary genres
"Let us finally render artists the justice that is their due. The liberal arts have sung their own praise long enough; they should now raise their voice in praise of the mechanical arts."
Diderot, ART (1751)
"The Encyclopédie, once it became a complete dictionary and a general treatise of all the sciences, would be far more sought after by the public and far more often consulted."
Arrêt du Conseil d'État, 8 March 1759
"You have castrated it, cut it up, mutilated it, torn it to shreds, without judgment, care or taste."
Diderot to Le Breton, 12 November 1764
"This work will surely, in time, produce a revolution in minds, and I hope that tyrants, oppressors, fanatics and the intolerant will not gain by it."
Diderot to Sophie Volland, 26 September 1762
"Setting up categories and policing them is therefore a serious business."
Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre (1984)
"The Encyclopédie did not seep into the base of society: it circulated through the middle sectors and saturated those at the top."
Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment (1979)
"In one sense, then, it was the Revolution that 'made' the books, and not the other way around."
Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution (1991)
"Whoever has had occasion to consult Chambers, Owen, &c. or even the voluminous French Encyclopedie, will have discovered the folly of attempting to communicate science under the various technical terms arranged in an alphabetical order."
Preface to the first Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768)
"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge."
Jimmy Wales, Slashdot (2004)
"An encyclopedia is never only a store of facts. It is an argument about how knowledge fits together, and about who gets to judge it."
The Big Idea
An encyclopedia is never only a store of facts. It is an argument about how knowledge fits together and about who gets to judge it. Diderot and d'Alembert saw this more clearly than many of their admirers. They called their famous tree of knowledge partly arbitrary, one world map among as many as there are projections of the globe, and so they built three tools instead of one: an alphabet, arbitrary but fast, to find things; a map, to orient; and links, to carry the connections that cross the map, and sometimes the arguments that could not be made openly. Two and a half centuries later the same three tools organise most of what we look up, and the same questions remain. Who can afford access? The Encyclopédie was public, but a set cost more than a year's wages for a skilled craftsman; Wikipedia is free. Who keeps the work going? One man wrote a quarter of the Encyclopédie, and its own publisher cut it in secret. And does anyone follow the links? Most of Wikipedia's are rarely clicked. So treat any classification, including your own folders and notes, as one projection, not the truth. Find things with a fast lookup such as the alphabet or search. Give a new field a rough map first, because structure helps newcomers most, then add links as your knowledge grows. Put the important links early, and say why two things connect: a link that states its reason teaches something even when nobody clicks it. And when you look something up, follow at least one reference to its source. An encyclopedia is a starting point, a summary someone chose, labelled and sometimes cut, and checking one source is how you find out which.
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Episode 43: Classification and Taxonomy : The Encyclopédie's natural history leaned on Buffon, who in 1749 attacked a Swedish botanist's way of sorting living things and declared that "there really exist in nature only individuals", and that genera, orders and classes "exist only in our imagination". The Swede was Carl Linnaeus, whose two-part names for species are still used today. Next time: Linnaeus, and whether the boxes we sort nature into are real.