Imagine for instance that you don't know what electricity is. Now read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity. There is no useful information there. Looking around now, I can't figure out any way I could come to any sort of reasonable understanding. This is a familiar feeling for me - it's the same feeling I get whenever I look up some new (to me) mathematical concept on wikipedia.
Wikipedia is not meant for teaching. Now, a wikipedia of textbooks (wikiversity?) would be extraordinarily helpful in an apocalypse, as well as every-day life.
Give the contents of wikipedia to our own civilization a century ago and watch the outstanding progress. A lot of theories wouldn't need to be tested, once the accuracy of wikipedia was determined. Things like penicilin wouldn't have to be discovered by accident. Several chemical reactions, which are named after their inventors, wouldn't need discovering.
Several open questions would be answered in an instant. Heck, give wikipedia to us a decade ago, we hadn't even discovered exoplanets. That would tell us that they are out there, and the outlines of basic techniques to find them.
Even things like the best reentry shape for a spaceship. Or chemical elements previously undiscovered.
WRT that particular entry, it is in fact, very abstract. But give it to a university, no matter the tech level, they will figure it out, given time. There's a lot of missing information indeed, but people are very good at filling in the blanks.
I'll give you another example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser . It is cryptic too, but remember that the laser, once conceived theoretically, didn't have a practical use. Now, we can't live without them. That entry lists the practical uses right there.
There are many, many more examples. My argument is that, while you cannot give wikipedia to someone and expect that a civilization will come out on the other end, the knowledge that is there is priceless. That would require work, but I bet any reasonable government would provide the necessary financing.
Oh, almost forgot, weaponry. It has several outlines for weapons. Heck, even the type of antenna best used for radar would be enough information to completely change the events of the World Wars.
Another thing I just remembered: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter . Helicopters were attempted for decades with no success, it says right there in the history section. But someone came up with the idea of flexible rotors. There, my last phrase is enough to point a team to the solution, even if the details about materials, manufacturing methods and the calculations are missing. But I bet people can figure it out.
It sounds like you are saying Science would have put faith into the accuracy of a single book. The methods of discovery are as important as the discovery itself.
Remember that a large part of the reverence that we have for "the ancients" is because there was a long stretch of time during the middle ages in which old knowledge that had disappeared was rediscovered. The scholastics/etc. were all about finding old books from Greek/Roman times and learning from them, much more than creating new discoveries.
And this made sense at the time, as it would if all of our technology and knowledge were gone.
Have you heard of Simple English Wikipedia? It does describe (e.g.) electricity in a useful way.
I've tried learning both math and physics from the Wikipedia and most of the time I've enjoyed it. If I'm feeling frustrated on an article(I know the feeling you have described) it usually means I should read about more basic stuff first (the stuff which is conveniently linked in the article for me).
What do you think useful information about electricity should look like?
Gah. Please, no. (I am a Wikipedian, and I can see that it is going to take YEARS to clean out all the ideological and commercial point-of-view-pushing crap in Wikipedia today.[1] I try to do what clean-up I can, but I am just one guy doing Wikipedia editing in my recreational time.) Most of the comments I see about Wikipedia here on Hacker News from people who have actually edited Wikipedia relate various complaints about its editorial policies.
The practical problem for people trying to rebuild civilization from Wikipedia would be finding the structure of its internal organization to get to the most needed information rapidly. (Wikipedia is not organized around building civilization--not in its editing culture, and not in any other respect.) And here on Hacker News where we often see our fellow participants desiring a tl;dr summary of a blog post, why not go for conciseness and use a reference tool much shorter than Wikipedia to rebuild civilization? That's what the book under review in the submission here is all about: a short book focused on rebuilding civilization with the most essential information in an organized format. Have you actually looked up how to rebuild civilization on Wikipedia? What would be the first article to read?
I do like the idea of the book under review in the submission here, as the author is thinking deeply about the issue of preserving the essential knowledge to rebuild civilization, and he is curating his book with that purpose in mind. The review here looks favorable, and I think I should read the book for enjoyment--I don't actually expect to need to rebuild civilization. I do expect to need to improve Wikipedia for years. Have you joined in on that project recently?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:WeijiBaikeBianji#Pre...
Wikipedia has a set of 1000 "vital articles" that would be a major asset in rebuilding civilization.[1] Of course, the internal details of the encyclopedia's organization, its Talk pages, esoteric editorial conflicts, Pokemon pages, etc. are irrelevant and would be omitted for a version of the encyclopedia put onto truly durable, readable storage media.
A few years ago, while talking with a Wikipedian about the Long Now Foundation,[2] he said something that has stuck with me:
"Who says it's not in the Wikimedia Foundation's mandate to commission certain articles to be etched in stone?"
I would love to see that goal advertized in one of the WMF's annual fundraising banners. It would be so much more awesome than investing in improved default typography (not that the exquisite new typography [3] isn't nice).
Naturally, there would need to be several language versions and many copies of the stone-etched Wikipedia articles. A more durable storage medium than stone would also be a good idea. And having the articles assumes people in the post-apocalyptic world could read an existing major language to a reasonable degree. Having a gradated table of contents, such that more fundamental and simple concepts came before sophisticated ones (e.g. 'sanitation' before 'vaccine', 'arithmetic' before 'calculus') would also obviously be helpful.
Most of the vital articles that would help in rebuilding civilization [1] are in bad condition. Maybe this discussion will inspire someone to push one of those articles to a better state.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_articles. The vital articles are divided into 11 categories. Of these, the following 300 or so articles from 6 of those categories would probably be the most helpful in rebuilding civilization:
- Everyday life: clothing, cooking, job, writing, and various major languages.
- Geography: city, Beijing, Cairo, Delhi, Jakarta, London, Mexico City, Moscow, New York City, Rome, Sao Paulo, Singapore, country, Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Europe, Oceania, North America, South America, Arctic, Middle East, sea, Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean, Pacific Ocean, lake, river, land, desert, forest, glacier, mountain, Alps, Andes, Himalayas, Rocky Mountains
- Health and medicine: common cold, influenza, pneumonia, burn, tuberculosis, ageing, antibiotic, vaccine, sanitation
- Science: scientific method, nature, astronomy, asteroid, comet, orbit, Solar System, Sun, Earth, Moon, Universe, biology, life, death, extinction, anatomy, brain, blood, heart, eye, immune system, liver, lung, muscle, skin, skeleton, reproduction, male, female, pregnancy, sex, botany, cell, ecology, evolution, genetics, heredity, organism and the 21 articles within (e.g. bird, insect, animal, human, dog, horse, plant, seed), virus, chemistry, alloy, bronze, steel, atom, chemical bond, salt, water, chemical element, carbon, iron, oxygen, silicon, chemical reaction, metal, mineral, molecule, periodic table, history of the Earth, geology, earthquake, rock, volcano, climate, cloud, flood, global warming, rain, season, weather, wind, map, soil, physics, electron, proton, photon, classical mechanics, energy, force, gravitation, heat, temperature, light, magnet, mass, matter, measurement, sound, thermodynamics, time, day, year
- Technology: all 109 articles
- Mathematics: arithmetic, addition, multiplication, fraction, logarithm, combinatorics, geometry, angle, trigonometry, area, line, point, circle, triangle, sphere, volume, function, calculus, number, 0, pi, e, integer, probability, statistics
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
The present geography will only serve as a history or even mythology.
Does not matter much. Civilization is not rebuilt in a day. Even if it took a few generations for them to understand the internal organization, they'd still be ahead.
That said, a "book" with that purpose would be much better, indeed.
But Wikipedia is extremely shallow.
A PHD typically requires study of 250 to 400 textbooks starting from Kindergarden (these are strictly course requirements). If you assume there are about 10,000 sub-sub fields of expertise for human kind (everything from sub-sub field in genetics to sub-sub field in airplane design) I think there may be about 1 million textbooks currently in print that covers pretty much every core expertise.
But again textbooks are not deep enough either. There are 1.3 million papers/research articles that gets published every year. A conservative estimate of all research articles ever published might be 50 million. That would be about about 250,000 printed books, each about 1000 pages.
I think we can comfortably say that most of the core human knowledge can be fit in to about 1 to 2 million printed books, each about of size 1000 pages.
[1] The example I can't find, so I can't be sure I remember this correctly, but an ancient Greek writer described an insect as having a number of legs that it quite clearly didn't, and wasn't corrected for a long, long time.
I can't think of anything that's more useful than all of the world's knowledge in a small box. The science, research and technology articles alone could turn men into gods of their time, imparting the knowledge necessary to wage war or enthrall most people. Can you imagine if modern wikipedia were dropped off anywhere in the world 1,000 years ago? The world would be completely different. Plus we'd be able to transmit so much of global culture, in different languages no less. If society was completely reset they would still have a knowledge of breaking bad and mash, plus all of the classics of today. Preserving wikipedia for centuries has to be one of the most beneficial things we can do for future societies, no matter what happens.
Specifically about this book, I heard a radio interview where the author said that the technology he felt was most important is the lathe. It's like the ycombinator of tools, you can use a partially completed lathe to make another lathe. He mentioned a story about a machinist who was able to start with one lathe and raw materials, and end up with an entire shop full of different tools. I almost went out and bought a cheap lathe, just the zombie apocalypse starts anytime soon.