ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. This book describes to map out and weigh up the implications of a means of knowledge dissemination, but also production that is the most far-reaching of any in existence. It focuses predominantly on Wikipedia itself approaching the latter from a variety of different angles or with different questions in mind. Wikipedians form a community of practice, but so too did the encyclopedists and the founders of the Royal Society. All the historical groups described here had something in common with Wikipedia, in that all sought to produce non-linear textual systems, whether a library, an academic journal or an integrated collection. Face-to-face communication is fundamentally different from, for instance, the written communication of Wikipedia, because i.
