Page 36 →Chapter 2 Crowdfunding Curation
Like Wikipedians, the creators of the Cyclopædia did not think small. The full title of the first edition advertised the “universal” scope of the endeavor, positioning it as both comprehensive and designed for a broad readership: Cyclopædia; or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences Containing the Definitions of the Terms, and Accounts of the Things Signify’d Thereby, in the Several Arts, Both Liberal and Mechanical, and the Several Sciences, Human and Divine: The Figures, Kinds, Properties, Productions, Preparations, and Uses, of Things Natural and Artificial: The Rise, Progress, and State of Things Ecclesiastical, Civil, Military, and Commercial: With the Several Systems, Sects, Opinions, &c: Among Philosophers, Divines, Mathematicians, Physicians, Antiquaries, Critics, &c: The Whole Intended as a Course of Ancient and Modern Learning.
While Chambers was the central curator, a project that was designed to achieve this breadth and then expand in future editions required substantial material support for both development and production. The social pressures exerted by multiple investors as well as the philosophical commitments of the collectives they and Chambers participated in shaped his performance as curator, driving a commitment to developing a text that could be accessed and read as broadly as possible. Chambers developed this text with multiple audiences in mind: potential readers as well as the publishers who invested in the project and the societies that philosophically and financially supported it. Working within these social pressures, he constructed a compendium of knowledge that furthered just his own intellectual interests and goals, but also those of the still-unfolding English Enlightenment and its vested supporters. The complex network that supported the project through financial and textual contributions was a predecessor of the much larger network that supports Wikipedia today, funding and maintaining a radically open project that is dependent on a far more distributed model of curatorial responsibility.
Page 37 →To appreciate the scope of this undertaking, it is important to understand the networks of material support in both projects, focusing on the subscribers and publishers who have applied their money, machinery, and philosophical commitments to launching and supporting these compendiums of knowledge. Such investments have shaped the content and ethos of these encyclopedias in ways both large and small, and they also provide a glimpse into the rhetorical stakes of these projects, which are inevitably situated within the cultural contexts and technologies of their time. Analysis of support streams provides a means of more closely examining the vested networks that supported these sprawling, continuing projects. The Cyclopædia was situated within a culture of observation-based expertise that saw tremendous surges during the Enlightenment as well as the physical networks that Chambers moved within. These included not only the gentlemen associated with the Royal Society, but also the publishers, translators, and booksellers of Fleet Street and Paternoster Row. Both of these communities intersected with members of the then-developing community of Freemasons who were in the process of forming the United Grand Lodge of England. Partly because of the digital affordances of speed and reach,1 Wikipedia has been shaped by a much broader and more anonymous network, but one that is committed to an open-access philosophy and a culture of information expansion that is a legacy of both earlier Internet communities and these early eighteenth century Newtonians.
Nonhuman actors play an important role in these collectives, not just as tools that are inextricably intertwined with human performances in production processes, but also as central impetuses for fund-raising. The materials and technologies for physical production and circulation were as essential for the development of these encyclopedias as human compositional and production skills were. Obtaining and maintaining these nonhumans requires substantial amounts of money, whether it be for paper, ink, type, presses, and binding materials or code, servers, domains, and the infrastructure that makes up the Internet. Nonhumans may not run the projects, but the projects are run on nonhumans and their intimate entwinement with human skill and work. Consequently they are important actors in cycles of fundraising drives, even bringing together human associations to distribute the commitment, risk, and rewards of financing the materials and machinery of encyclopedic production. Nonhumans are interwoven in this narrative, glimpsed among the humans who formed the public faces of the communities that shaped these projects.
Networks of Material Support: The Cyclopædia
The intellectual, professional, and frequently aristocratic publishing and scientific research communities of London were a somewhat unexpected place for Page 38 →Ephraim Chambers to find himself. Born in 1680, he grew up on his parents’ farm in Kendal and received a basic education at local grammar schools.2 After sending his older brother Nathaniel to Oxford, his family had no money left over to educate Ephraim, the youngest of three sons. Consequently he was sent to London to become a machinist’s apprentice, presumably at the usual age of around fifteen. He was evidently not a particularly successful apprentice; an account of his life that appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1785 reports that he had “a perfect aversion to the business, and, young as he was, having formed ideas not at all reconcilable to manual labor, he was removed from thence, and tried at other business, which was full as little conformable to his inclinations.”3 At the rather remarkable age of thirty-three, he found himself apprenticed to John Senex, who is primarily remembered as a master globe and mapmaker. Senex was also a successful scientific publisher who would be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1728. He was deeply invested in the scientific research emerging from what was then called natural philosophy.
Rather quickly the two seem have come to an agreement that Chambers would continue on as an apprentice, but that his primary occupation would be to work on expanding Harris’s Lexicon Technicum, to which Senex had been an initial supporting subscriber. He was rarely seen behind the shop counter, according to accounts: “Mr. Chambers made no considerable improvement in the technical part of the business. His mind was too much engrossed by his studies to permit him to pay much attention to mechanical acquisitions, so that, when his apprenticeship expired, he was indeed a good geographer, but a very indifferent globe maker.”4 Instead he took advantage of being in proximity to a considerable collection of reference texts and devoted his time to encyclopedia building.
That “improved edition” of the Lexicon Technicum eventually became the Cyclopædia, which earned tremendous accolades and launched him into the social spheres he would be professionally associated with for the rest of his life: the Royal Society with its connections to the Freemasons, and the London publishing community that clustered along Fleet Street and Paternoster Row. His work in the Republic of Letters took the form of a variety of commercial jobs while he developed the second edition of his other, more personal project. These included serving as a translator and editor for a number of publications, including the Literary Magazine . . . by a Society of Gentlemen and the Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure. He also specialized in translation of scientific texts from the French, translating Herman Boerhaave’s A New Method of Chemistry and an abridged edition of the Philosophical History and Memoirs of the Royal Academy of Science at Paris.
Chambers’s careful negotiation of political, professional, and philosophical alliances, along with his publishers’ promotion of subscriptions, ensured that his project was adequately funded. It was costly to publish, consisting of two Page 39 →folio volumes. Together these comprised 512 pages, which included a number of double-page scientific and technical engravings. Producing a project of this size required the cooperation of a number of communities that shared a common dedication to scientific advancement and the circulation of emerging knowledge. These collectives, which have significant intersections and overlaps in membership, are traceable through the records of publication and subscription listings, alongside membership rolls of the Royal Society and the United Grand Lodge of London.
The Publishers
While many of the business records of long-standing London publishers have been destroyed, the central publishing affiliations that produced the Cyclopædia are easily traced because they are conveniently listed on the title pages of both editions, much as they are in contemporary books. In order to adequately finance the project and further diversify the considerable financial risk involved, a network of publishing houses bought shares in the property rather than leave a single house to shoulder the full cost which would have posed an impossible financial burden. This consortium was likely an early association of the publishing investment group known as the Conger, formed in 1719 at the Chapter Coffee House in Paternoster Row for such purposes.5 Plomer noted that the name was “ingeniously said to be derived from the eel, meaning that the association, collectively, would swallow all smaller fry” (19). Many of the Cyclopædia publishers were notable scientific and educational publishers, as well as publishers of classic and popular books.6 A few of the houses have been particularly long-standing (such as Longmans, which is to this day a noted textbook and reference publishing house.) The seventeen publishers that invested included such prominent names as James and John Knapton, John Darby, Daniel Midwinter, John Senex, Arthur Bettesworth, Robert Gosling, John Pemberton, William and John Innys, John Osborn and Thomas Longman, Charles Rivington, John Hooke, Ranew Robinson, Francis Clay, Aaron Ward, Edward Symon, Daniel Browne, Andre Johnston, Aaron Ward, and Thomas Osborn. Nearly half of these houses were members of the Conger of 1742 recorded by Rivington. These publishing houses lent the ethos of their brands to the project, relying on the rhetorical power of attaching this text to an established, esteemed network. E. Johanna Hartelius has argued that this sort of identification plays a formative role in the establishment of expertise,7 especially the sort of foundational expertise that a successful encyclopedia requires for sufficient circulation. By tying the book to not one but seventeen prominent publishers on the title page, the houses not only acknowledged their investment but also signaled association between established brands committed to distribution of the latest scientific information. The collective ethos constructed by this cooperative performance transferred to the encyclopedic text, conveying expertise on the first Page 40 →edition when it was yet unread. When the text’s authority and value were quickly established through heavy circulation and awards, it in turn repaid the original publishers’ investment by contributing to their ethos as astute distributors of an authoritative, reliable text.
Business concerns facing this community also shaped some aspects of the Cyclopædia and Chambers’s arguments for it. In addition to his work on this ongoing encyclopedic project, Chambers’s various editing and translation projects ensured that he was deeply engaged with this network. Most of his closest recorded associations were with his publishers: Thomas Longman arranged for Chambers to be cared for in the Longman family home during his periods of sickness and is recorded as making sure that food would be left around the house for him to find.8 One of the most obvious issues facing this community was the relatively new codification of copyright. The long shadow of the Statute of Anne, passed eighteen years before in 1710, was an ongoing issue that may have pushed Chambers to consider the complexities of textual ownership. Concerns about ownership and intellectual property were certainly not uncommon along Fleet Street and Paternoster Row (both of which were within a short walk from his apartment), and the statute posed implications that were not immediately clear.9 It was an issue that would remain ongoing for decades, until the statute was interpreted in Donaldson v. Beckett in 1774.10 The investors and curator also faced a substantial delay on publication of the second edition that was caused by a proposed bill before Parliament that would have required publishers to publish additions or changes to reference texts in separate addendums rather than in a new consolidated edition of the primary text itself. Undeterred, Chambers and his supporters devoted these years of delay to continued expansion of the text. These juridical factors impacted not just the text itself, but also the material costs and logistics of printing either a separate or expanded edition—and, by extension, the demands of being a shareholder in this sort of publication.
This network of initial investors shaped the encyclopedia by providing financial support and negotiation of the material factors necessary for physically producing an encyclopedia. They also set in motion a crucial process of widening the potential audience and funding for the project by soliciting subscriptions that further shaped production in important ways. The 1728 subscription list provides crucial clues about other networks that influenced the project through their philosophical commitments and tied it even more closely to the concerns of early eighteenth-century London.
The Subscribers
The subscription listings document advance public interest and investment in the work. It is important to understand, though, that they do not offer a full Page 41 →picture of the text’s audience, since many other audience members accessed the text through serialization, lending, and the popular tradition of reading aloud. Publishing houses commonly pursued advance subscriptions to more accurately gauge the public reception of and investment in a proposed work. Unless the publication attracted a minimum number of subscribers—usually two hundred—projects did not move forward. If sufficient interest was apparent, the publishers distributed a prospectus for the work that included the names of the subscribers to date, hoping to attract new income through the persuasiveness of not just the project description but also the stature or familiarity of the individuals who supported it.11 In the smaller, tightly knit communities of early eighteenth-century London, these names lent ethos by association through appeals to a potential reader or investor’s social connection to individuals, as well as to the social capital of family names, titles, and memberships in exclusive private societies. These names invited identification with a number of shifting networks associated with commitments to natural philosophy and to informal, egalitarian education.
The Cyclopædia subscription list documents the 375 readers—among them four women and the first Jewish member of the Royal Society—who were willing and able to pay four guineas to demonstrate their interest in its eventual publication. This was not an inconsiderable amount of money at the time, representing approximately a month’s budget for the average family. As Yeo explains, subscription was a way that members of the professional class could affordably demonstrate patronage of projects they particularly supported: “Subscriptions were a public sign of interest from a wide range of social groups and occupations, including not just aristocrats, academics, clergy, and gentlemen, but also lawyers, doctors, surgeons, teachers, merchants, watchmakers, brewers, and, of course, printers and booksellers.”12 All are represented in the Cyclopædia’s subscription list.
Association with two societies, one public and one secretive, lent rhetorical authority and material support to this publication. Two significant networks that coalesce within the subscriber listing when it is cross-referenced with society membership rosters are the Royal Society and the city’s Freemasons, who were then organizing the United Grand Lodge of England. The broader membership of these groups intersected significantly, which is not a surprise given the substantial overlap that both societies have documented and celebrated.13 At least forty-three fellows of the Royal Society subscribed, making up 11 percent of its subscription base, as can be expected given the Royal Society’s pursuit of scientific advancement and the Enlightenment project. Fifty-three of the subscribers (14 percent) were registered Masons whose names appeared on the United Grand Lodge of England lodge minutes for 1723–29.
Page 42 →While the Royal Society was quite well established by the late 1720s, being approximately sixty years old, the Freemasons were just beginning to significantly establish themselves in London. Interest in Freemasonry had been quietly growing across England for decades and had from the beginning been intertwined with devotion to scientific progress and public communication of science. Individual lodges were well established during Chambers’s early life, but it was not until June 1717 that the four London lodges declared themselves to be the first Grand Lodge in the world. Freemasonry was increasingly popular during the period in which the first edition was completed and published: between 1717 and 1730 the number of Lodges in London increased from the founding four to more than one hundred.14
Although the organization has always been associated in the notions of inebriated gentlemen’s supper clubs and mystical aspects of secret societies, it has also from its inception been dedicated to self-improvement and educational advancement. In England this work began with its founder, Elias Ashmole, who in 1677 gifted his extensive collection of natural philosophy artifacts to what became the first public museum of science in England, the Ashmolean.15 Throughout the first half of the eighteenth century, lodges frequently held lecture series “designed to educate, inform, and entertain,” covering subjects “from anatomy, chemistry, education, and experimental science, to architecture and the liberal arts.”16 The early grand masters “had the vision [of Freemasonry] as a vehicle for the transmission of new ideas, and the discipline and determination to pursue their objectives.”17 This interest in research that was emerging from observational natural philosophy was so strong that there was heavy cross recruitment at this time between the Royal Society of London and the United Grand Lodge, and Masons occupied a number of key positions in the Royal Society throughout the eighteenth century. Peter Clark has estimated that nearly half the fellows of the Royal Society were Freemasons; Trevor Stewart’s more conservative interpretation of the evidence suggested a figure of around 30 percent.18 Berman suggests that “the only senior Fellows of the Royal Society not acknowledged as Freemasons and who served as President were Newton and Sloane.”19
Chambers’s master, John Senex, was a central point of articulation in a vital network that led full circle between the Royal Society, the United Grand Lodge, and the publishing community. Senex was a prominent scientific publisher,20 and his house made important contributions to the craft of cartography, developing a portable set of John Ogilby’s road maps, An Actual Survey of All the Principal Roads of England and Wales, that remained in print for a number of years, as did his A New General Atlas, one of the most comprehensive atlases of the time. Senex did not limit himself to terrestrial cartography, pursuing a number of strategic projects with Edmund Halley. Laurence Worms wrote, “Individual maps of particular note included Halley’s ‘A description of the passage of the shadow of Page 43 →the moon over England’ of 1715, the first printed solar eclipse map and one of the earliest scientific thematic maps. Senex produced special ‘smoak’d glasses’ for observing this eclipse.”21 He and Halley collaborated on additional projects, among them a limited series of paired globes, one terrestrial and one celestial, based on Halley’s observations.
Senex’s house also produced more common textual formats, including the first galleys for the 1726 edition of the Principia as well as Newton’s Universal Arithmetic, among many other works on mathematics, optics, chemistry, anatomy, and architecture by prominent scientists of the day.22 Crucially Senex also served for a time as the primary publisher for the nascent Grand Lodge, publishing the first edition of the Constitutions of the Freemasons with John Hooke in 1723, while Chambers was still his apprentice. His edition of the Principia was central among other important scientific texts that were published and distributed by the Masons.23 And, of course, he served as the original investor in the Cyclopædia’s early project development and remained connected to the project as an investing publisher.
While it is not possible to conclusively demonstrate that Chambers himself was a Mason,24 he certainly associated with Masons through Senex, who worked closely with many scientists who were Masons or fellows of the Royal Society or both. One of the latter was the author of the Lexicon Technicum, John Harris, who had been elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1696, given the Boyle Lectures in 1698, and served as the Royal Society’s secretary in 1710.25 It was entirely reasonable that Senex would support and fund a revision of Harris’s project, given their mutual connection to two societies that were committed to both furthering knowledge and circulating it as widely as possible. Senex’s frequent collaborator Halley had also worked closely with Isaac Newton, who was central in the founding of both the Royal Society and the earliest English Freemasonry lodges that eventually became the United Grand Lodge of England. Senex himself is recorded in the 1723 constitutions as senior warden of Lodge XV, which met at the Greyhound at Fleet Street, and was a junior grand warden of the United Grand Lodge in 1723.26 He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1728, the year the Cyclopædia’s first edition was published, and contributed occasionally to the Philosophical Transactions. Consequently Senex, his beliefs, and his texts serve as a linkage to other areas of this tightly knit network. These weak ties27 were an important articulation in these intersecting communities that likely offered a locus of coordination as Senex maintained his association with the project from its earliest stages through its publication.
The support offered by members of these two groups was an important material expression of the Royal Society’s and the Masons’ philosophical dedication to scientific advancement. Chambers’s encyclopedia was not only practical Page 44 →and useful but also an instrument for evangelizing Newtonian science across the country and the continent. Historian Margaret Jacob argued in her foundational study of European Freemasonry and the Enlightenment that “the Cyclopædia gave considerable attention to Newtonian science and also contained one of the first accounts of British Freemasonry, which was widely cited by Continental journals. In the generation after the great Boyle lectures, it played a significant role in spreading Newtonian science to a wide and literate audience on both sides of the Channel.”28 Chambers’s project can be understood as a community-supported effort on behalf of Newtonian Science, which then retained a controversial aura, especially when it came to matter theory and the principle of gravitation. This effort was one that the subscribers felt was well worth funding, and one that a significant number of Masons felt aligned with their philosophical mores sufficiently to warrant funding. Their subscriptions prefigured similar financial support later offered by French Masonic lodges to Diderot’s Encyclopédie.29
The language of the Cyclopædia is deliberately plain, designed to communicate Newton’s mathematics-based scientific discourse to lay readers.30 Harris had begun this work in the Lexicon Technicum, which Larry Stewart has called “his lasting contribution to the victory of Newtonianism” (110).31 Still, it functioned as only one early example of a concerted effort that continued for decades.32 Chambers’s extension of Harris’s work incorporated important rhetorical shifts that were meant to educate readers who could then argue in favor of Newton. Yeo describes this key difference: while the Lexicon described Newton’s contributions, it did not define them in context with other prominent schools of natural philosophy, such as Cartesianism and Leibnitzianism. Chambers, on the other hand, “consolidated a range of scientific topics under the umbrella of ‘Newtonian Philosophy’ and defined this against various opponents, especially Cartesianism. . . . Moreover, the summaries were in a form ready-made for polemical contrast” (163–64).33 He cross-referenced relevant articles such as “gravity” and “attraction,” building paths that could be followed as what Yeo has called a “cumulative textbook” (166) on Newtonian thought. A reader of this encyclopedia would be able to gain sufficient systematic understanding of Newton’s principles to not just adopt these theories as his own viewpoint, but to argue cogently about them at the coffeehouse or pub.
In order for this effort to be successful, it was important that the text be accessible to the broadest possible audience—one that was indicated by the claims to universality in the Cyclopædia’s title. The natural philosophy community placed significant emphasis on wide discussion of new developments, which would help ensure the engagement, collaboration, and rigor necessary for the continuing development of new knowledge. Commitment to public circulation of knowledge exemplified the Enlightenment ideal of encouraging intellectual discussion that Page 45 →crossed boundaries of class, politics, and religion as well as national borders. The plain language that the Cyclopædia was written in was meant to facilitate this broad circulation, and the material forms that this text was produced in also functioned as important nonhuman actors in the process of circulation and subsequent development of a richer information ecology.
In addition to bound folio copies of the full text, serialized installments were made available. Serialization provided another way besides subscription for less-moneyed individuals to access the encyclopedia, purchasing three sheets weekly for sixpence rather than a complete bound volume.34 This material form of the text appealed to a different network of interested readers who, despite not being able to devote a month’s budget to buying an encyclopedia or having access to the Philosophical Transactions, wanted to keep up with emerging developments and attain an informal, general education. These sheets could be kept and eventually bound, or they could circulate within networks by being passed hand to hand or read aloud. It is important to remember that reading aloud was a common practice at the time, particularly in private contexts. This form of performance offered the potential to broaden circulation once again by offering access to those who were not invited to take part in the largely male spaces of private societies or coffeehouse and pub culture, and also to the illiterate.
These intersecting networks, then, all contributed to the commitments and content of the Cyclopædia. The publishing network’s support was crucial to the early content development work performed by Chambers, which was time consuming and undertaken over a period of years. Later the coalition the publishers formed ensured that the production process would in fact take place and, by its members having lent their names, enhanced the rhetorical identification that helped give the first edition the best possible chance at success. In contrast the subscribers supported the project through investment in consumption, offering tangible support of the project concept as well as providing a concrete target audience with demonstrated interest in particular types of content. Their demographics demonstrate the range of social strata that formed this vested audience. They also reveal important affiliations with exclusive societies that were deeply involved with shaping the development of natural philosophy and the circulation of emerging scientific knowledge. The weight of their collective names contributed credibility as well as material support to the project. Together all these intersecting networks shaped the range of authorial performance that was available to Chambers.
Networks of Material Support: Wikipedia
Wikipedia’s support streams bear strong resemblance to aspects of the Cyclopædia’s support streams. The philosophies and curatorial processes of the Page 46 →Cyclopædia were remarkably democratic for their time, and Wikipedians have gone it one better, harnessing the advantages of an era with significantly different cultural mores as well as the affordances of socio-technological systems to develop a community of practice that is, in part, founded on radically egalitarian principles. Eighteenth-century commitments to the public circulation of information have been extended in the twenty-first century by the open access movement, which Wikipedia is an integral part of, and supporters are invited to contribute through identification with moral arguments for this type of circulation. The need to fund machinery for production and distribution persists, but this digital project negotiates obvious differences in the available affordances and requirements of twenty-first-century production technologies. Technological changes have also significantly shifted the generic forms through which donations are solicited and the presentation of donor identities.
In a striking similarity to the Cyclopædia’s development, Wikipedia also began with one man working in a back room for another man who ran a media-based business, although this arrangement was significantly more short-lived. Larry Sanger was a newly minted philosophy Ph.D. when he moved to San Diego in 2000 to begin working for Jimmy Wales.35 Wales, who was then primarily a venture capitalist, had floated the idea of a free, collaborative encyclopedia on list-servs that he and Sanger both frequented in the late 1990s. The two met through those same mailing lists, and they eventually agreed that Sanger would lead the development of a new open-access encyclopedia called Nupedia. The project was underwritten by Wales’s company, Bomis, an X-rated search portal that was primarily supported by advertising. Sanger served as project manager and policy developer and very soon was leading a small community of credentialed experts who shared the responsibility and work of reviewing potential articles. Nupedia relied on expert peer review of materials through a multilevel vetting process that proved to be extraordinarily time consuming: by early winter of 2001, nearly two years into the project, only twenty-five articles had been deemed appropriate for publication. The community remained similarly limited.
When a central sever failure imposed even more extensive delays, Wales and Sanger began to reconsider alternative platforms and project missions. After discovering the WikiWikiWeb that had been developed by Ward Cunningham a number of years earlier, they realized that a wiki platform would have the potential to manage expanding amounts of information while allowing contributors direct access to edit the text. This openness is built into the platform design: Cunningham argued that wikis enable radical collaboration “because of [their] total freedom, ease of access and use, simple and uniform navigational conventions, and apparent lack of formal structure.”36 The MediaWiki platform that was developed for the project affords (as do all wikis) dynamic content delivery, Page 47 →real-time development, and a layered interface that delivers updated versions of article content as well as preserves edit histories, editorial conversations, and previous iterations.
The platform’s openness certainly contributed to the exponential textual and community growth that drove Wikipedia’s expansion after its launch in early 2001, along with substantial investments of time and funding from contributors. From six hundred articles imported primarily from the 1911 Britannica, it grew to “1,300 [articles] in March, 2,300 in April, and 3,900 in May.”37 Sanger, Wales, and Tim Shell served as the initial project managers, evangelizing the project through media outlets as well as overseeing community management and early policy development. Sanger was the only paid employee, and as the community grew, he quickly ran into a series of clashes with an increasingly egalitarian Wikipedian community that he described as being controlled by “trolls” and “anarchist-types” who rejected the idea of a centralized authority figure running the project. Tiring of extended conflict, he left the project in March 2002 and has since been an outspoken critic of Wikipedia. In the years since, the project has been developed in a more decentralized fashion by both core and extended communities.
Wikipedia famously runs on the work of this network of contributors—their contributions of time and labor, and also through essential financial contributions. This encyclopedia relies on a broad, shifting network of donors in order to continue distribution. Wales dipped into the personal fortune he had earned in the finance sector and previous Internet start-ups in order to fund the start-up and maintenance costs until 2003, when he handed financial operations over to the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. While this project avoids the costs of print production that the publishers of the Cyclopædia faced, the costs of maintaining the technological infrastructure necessary to run a website that handles more than six thousand page requests per second and stores every single edit that has been made to the encyclopedia since its inception are significant.38 In 2013 more than half a billion readers accessed Wikipedia each month. Facilitating this tremendous level of information development and flow cost the foundation US$35.7 million for that year.
These costs were covered by more than two million donors who raised a total of US$50 million in the foundation’s annual end-of-year fund-raising campaign.39 The campaign has become exponentially more successful each year, starting from the US$28,992 in PayPal donations it saw during its first drive in 2003. Foundation grants from entities such as the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the like provide significant budgetary assistance.40 While much of the work of maintaining the project is done by volunteers, the Wikimedia Foundation retains a core staff of 125 (which is considerably leaner than other Top 10 websites) as well as legal counsel. Wikipedia has always Page 48 →refused to include advertising in its business model and positions the ad-free nature of its pages as an appealing and ethical feature in its campaign messages, which frequently ask readers to help keep Wikipedia free. This commitment to a nonprofit model is a significant break with the business models of prior encyclopedias, which have been profit centers for publishing houses or dedicated businesses focusing solely on their own text, as with the Britannica, which currently positions itself as a “global educational publisher.”41 While the Cyclopædia demonstrated a commitment to broad circulation and public discussion of information, it always remained a for-profit endeavor and a valuable literary property. The nature of its business model inevitably shaped the performances of its publishers and authors, just as Wikipedia’s nonprofit model invites voluntary work and donations.
Unlike Chambers and his publishers, who counted on support from geographically localized communities of practice, Wikipedia positions its appeals to a globalized audience of users and donors. As with the Cyclopædia subscription lists, a list of named, significant donors appears in the final pages of each year’s annual report, but this list does not begin to account for the hundreds of thousands of donations—some as small as US$1—offered by anonymous and pseudonymous donors around the world. The World Wide Web itself serves as a point of articulation in this scenario, exploding the possibilities of communicative speed and reach while obscuring the real-world identities of users.42 Wikipedians and users of Wikipedia arrive at the site from anywhere in the world that has web access, whether it be through hardwired structures or mobile networks. Their investment in the central project of Wikipedia is spurred by and evidenced through the development of more than 285 language-based forks of the project. The largest are the Spanish, Japanese, French, Portuguese, Chinese, Polish, Russian, Dutch, and Italian editions, which each contain more than one million articles.43 Each of these editions addresses the information needs of specific linguistic audiences rather than assuming that all audiences must access information delivered in standard American English. This focus on disparate needs encourages worldwide investment in building and extending all Wikipedias and encourages individual donations for the version that individual users access most often. During the fund-raising campaigns donations come in through the central fund-raising site but also through donations to individual country-based chapters. This global reach enables and relies on a far more distributed audience of actors than the Cyclopædia could hope to reach in the early eighteenth-century print economy, which was further bounded by the slow reality of international travel via foot, horse, or ship.
The Wikimedia Foundation also publishes a list of donors who have contributed more than US$1,000, but the rhetorical deployment of this list is significantly different from that of the Cyclopædia. The eighteenth-century list appears in the Page 49 →front matter of the bound folios, with the names displayed in the same typeface and size as the body text. It is meant to be easily found and perused by those who invested, by those who care about who invested, and by more casual readers who might happen on it while flipping through the pages. In contrast the Wikipedia donors list is not part of the central site. It cannot be accessed from the encyclopedia’s front page or even from the page linked through the “Donate to Wikipedia” link that appears on the primary site’s static sidebar. It is not hidden, being publicly published in the foundation’s annual report and easy to locate with a basic Google search, but neither is it intended to be a persuasive part of the central text or to offer the same rhetorical appeal that the Cyclopædia’s list did. Appearing at the very end of the report, it lists more than five hundred donor names in six-point font. Its primary function is acknowledgment: public acknowledgment for a primary audience of donors looking for their own names. Not all the names belong to individual humans; many acknowledgments are to corporate foundations (especially in the US$25,000 and up categories) or to family foundations operating as charitable trusts. This list directs emotional appeal to its primary audience by inviting them to feel part of a community of like-minded individuals who wish to be identified as publicly committed to the material support of an open-access project. This rhetorical inclusion invites them to maintain that commitment and become repeat donors.
However, most donors are not included in this listing, since the list is limited to donations of more than US$1,000 and the bulk of project donations are made in much smaller increments. As awareness, use, and contributions have grown, the donor base has broadened and diversified to the point that it is much more difficult to speculate as to which specific communities, if any, coalesce in the annual fund-raising campaigns. In fact the donor names often remain entirely unknown to the foundation, since anonymity is offered in the donation process. This aspect is compounded by the “screen” of the Internet, which still offers the opportunity to obscure or skew identities despite the trend toward use of real names that has been driven by Google and Facebook policies. The necessity of successful appeals to this geographically and linguistically diverse audience has led Wikipedia’s fund-raising committee to rely heavily on dynamic site notices, multimodal communication, and careful usability-testing protocols to successfully develop fund-raising messages. This interactive design contrasts rather starkly with the comparatively static, unidirectional broadsheets and pamphlets that Chambers and his publishers produced in the King’s English.
The annual end-of-year donation drive messages rely heavily on appeals from kairos and logos, making an argument based on use value and the power of the crowd. The timing of the annual drive is itself persuasive, being meant to appeal to donors who need year-end tax deductions. The messages are also Page 50 →kairotic, appearing immediately as the visitor accesses the site or an individual page. This prompt appearance is persuasive in two ways. By catching visitors at the moment they are considering using the site’s information rather than having actually begun to use it, it both takes advantage of this interstitial moment to invite consideration of the moral responsibility of repaying this use and avoids the counterproductive annoyance of interrupting reading and information processing. This calculated interplay between human readers and the articulated nonhumans that constitute the messaging system invites readers to donate of their own accord rather than asking them to feel that they are paying for access by interrupting the reading experience in the same way that subscription-optional sites such as Slate.com solicit funding with pop-up ads.
Extended Description
“If everyone reading this right now gave $3, our fundraiser would be done within an hour. Yep, that’s about the price of buying a programmer a coffee.”
2014 banner appeal displayed at the top of articles. All highlights original. Image courtesy Wikipedia under CC BY-SA license.
These pop-up and banner messages present a low interface barrier to the act of donation by facilitating easy contributions transferred directly from several account options. Donors simply click on the amount they wish to donate (or enter an amount if they want to send more than US$100), indicate whether it will be a one-time or monthly withdrawal, and then select the payment type if they want to opt out of the default one-time donation. With a maximum of three clicks, they are then taken to the payment site of their choice and invited to enter the necessary information to complete the transaction. The full process is done in only a few minutes, and the donor moves on to the information he or she wished to access in the first place. No checks, no filling out forms with pen or pencil, no envelopes or stamps, no chance that the donor might forget to take the donation to a mailbox, and no waiting for the mail system to move the donation to its destination. No servants wending their way through cobbled streets to deliver the sealed missive or agents facilitating a transfer with bankers, as would likely have been the case for wealthy subscribers in early modern London. Instead an articulated system of nonhuman agents facilitates the transfer of funds directly into the foundation’s coffers.
These pop-up and banner messages deliver a unified, compressed argument that respects the audience’s time and accounts for the fact that readers have accessed Wikipedia to find information, not necessarily make a donation. Donors are invited to understand themselves as part of a large crowd through awareness Page 51 →that if everyone reading the site in that hour gave a small donation—the mundane price of a coffee that many readers probably purchased that day—then the site’s needs would be met. The small average donation is mentioned to assure readers that they need not donate much, while the donation menu invites and facilitates small donations while also encouraging readers to give at least US$3. The amounts are also made more accessible through strategic association with types of contributors who make an obvious contribution that the audience is unlikely to have disagreements with (programmers rather than editors).
The argument makes a powerful philosophical appeal based on open access to knowledge, relying on commonly deployed metaphors of the library or the public park to help readers consider the use value of free, public materials. The central impetus for development of all the Wikipedias is “an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language.”44 This commitment has included printed copies for distribution in the developing world. Identification with the primary tenet of the larger open-access movement—that information, especially emerging research, should be available “online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions”45—has been a consistently powerful rhetorical appeal, drawing both donors and contributors. As Hartelius has suggested, this rhetorical move is a strong deployment of eunoia, positioning open encyclopedias as moral contributions to a public good. Their ostensibly inclusive policies further this appeal, suggesting that “everyone has something encyclopedia-worthy to contribute, the compilation of which comprises dialogic expertise.”46 Donating to Wikipedia is suggested payment for services rendered (after all, are you not reading it right now? it asks), but it is also an ethical contribution to a public resource that furthers the greater good.
It also demonstrates a form of social resistance against the strictures of copyright laws, which have become extraordinarily codified and extended in the centuries since Chambers and his publishers considered the potential of the Statute of Anne. Just as discussions of textual ownership and authors’ rights were in the air then, conversations about ethical commitments to the public domain and open access to our cultural heritage have circulated over the past forty years in digital communities that were concerned with such topics. These issues became increasingly prominent at the turn of the twenty-first century and provided one impetus for development of Wikipedia as an open, free encyclopedia. In the earliest Wikipedia fund-raiser, proponents of Open Access and Creative Commons likely formed a primary percentage of the donor base. Not only were these advocates heavily disposed to support projects related to their ethical philosophies of information ownership, but as members of the digerati, they were also more likely to simply be aware of Wikipedia’s early existence. The devotion shown by this early group has Page 52 →clear analogous ties to Enlightenment ideals of broad circulation and the material expressions of support offered by the Cyclopædia’s subscribers, who invested partly to support distribution of a centralized resource of Enlightenment-based information to a wider group of people—albeit those who could afford to purchase a copy or had access to a friend, club, or library that had a physical copy.
In both of these encyclopedias, networks of investors have supported content they understood as urgently needed within the context of their times. Their material commitments furthered specific philosophical agendas concerning the broad circulation of emerging information, both within the English Enlightenment and the tremendously broad knowledge economy of the Internet. In the case of the Cyclopædia, a careful focus on Newtonian theories furthered the work of intersecting societies with a mutual commitment to natural philosophy and to evangelizing Newtonianism across not just England but also the Continent. Their commitment to public access to and discussion of emerging science likely influenced the very language of this encyclopedia, driving it toward plain, easily understood descriptions. The twenty-first-century effort of Wikipedia advanced an even broader vision of access, taking advantage of the potentialities offered by technological agents that made it possible to create a near-infinitely expanding text driven by direct text contributions and distributed to anyone with Internet access or the ability to reach a paper copy. Supporters have responded to this moral argument, donating in order to maintain the project’s open-access principles.
The performative and social aspects of rhetorical agency are evident as we follow these support streams. Communities’ engagement with emerging information and their ethical commitments to circulation and discussion undoubtedly drove individual donation decisions, but what is more important, these collective performances generated the conditions under which such extensive, long-term projects could be successfully developed and persuasively produced. These material streams of support also socially constrained authorial agency by creating an obligation to perform within the ethical commitments of the funded project, ultimately shaping the texts themselves. Wikipedia is obligated to remain available free of charge, to reject advertising, and to maintain an open interface that affords the continued expansion of its content. The authorial performance of curating the Cyclopædia was deeply situated within the beliefs of its earliest funders and their interests in seeing the broadest possible circulation for a consolidated resource on Newtonianism in addition to other critical information areas such as religion, law, and military defense. In both cases contributors are persuaded by the hope that their money will lead to the potential of enhanced agency for readers, who may use their new knowledge of the content as social capital and in turn extend the agency of the text by bringing it into new social contexts, whether it be a coffeehouse or a school in Somalia.