Authorship and Ownership in the Encylopedic Tradition: A Cross-Case Comparison of Chambers’ Cyclopaedia (1728) and the English Wikipedia

Wikipedia is often discussed as the first of its kind: the first massively collaborative, Internet-based encyclopedia that belongs to the public domain. While it’s true that wiki technology enables large-scale,distributed collaborations, the concept of a collaborative encyclopedia is not new, and neither is the idea that private ownership might not apply to such documents. More than 275 years ago, in the preface to the 1728 edition of his Cyclopaedia, Ephraim Chambers mused on the intensely collaborative nature of the volumes he was about to publish. His thoughts were remarkably similar to contemporary intellectual property arguments for Wikipedia, and the compilation and structure of these encyclopedias demonstrate numerous similarities.

This dissertation employs a grounded, mixed method approach to examine issues of authorship and ownership in these two texts. The research will demonstrate that the “Author Construct” is not static across eras, genres, or print technologies. In contrast to traditional considerations of the poetic author, the encyclopedic author engages with different issues of agency, authority, identity, and trust. These variations challenge contemporary ideas concerning the difference between print and digital authorship as well as the notion that new media intellectual property arguments are without historical precedent. More broadly, this study contributes to an understanding of the role of authorship and ownership in the current heated discourse concerning intellectual property.