Everyone Knows Everything: Wikipedia and the Globalization of Knowledge

by Marshall T. Poe

In this fascinating look at mass collaboration on the Internet, Marshall Poe takes us on an incredible trip that begins with the origins of human society and ends with the emergence of “WikiWorld,” the universal sphere in which billions of people create, trade, and transform all the information there is. According to Poe, the collaborative instincts driving Web phenomena such as Wikipedia, MySpace, and YouTube are ancient, but they have been transformed by the democratizing technology and culture of the Internet. The Web liberated the innate human impulse to "lend a hand" and to “pitch in” for the first time in history. The result has been a collaborative explosion that is transforming life, sex, business, politics, religion, and science. Poe offers the first in-depth description and explanation of this strange, new online world of working, playing, and thinking together.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published September 15, 2009

About the author

Marshall Tillbrook Poe (born December 29, 1961) is an American historian, writer, editor and founder of the New Books Network, an online collection of podcast interviews with a wide range of non-fiction authors. He has taught Russian, European, Eurasian and World history at various universities including Harvard, Columbia, University of Iowa, and, currently, the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has also taught courses on new media and online collaboration.

Poe is the author or editor of a number of books on early modern Russia. He has also published A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet, a book that examines how various communications media shape social practices and values.

In 2005, Poe founded the now-defunct MemoryArchive, a universal wiki-type archive of contemporary memoirs. It encouraged people to contribute written accounts of their personal memories that would be part of a searchable, online database. There he contributed numerous personal accounts of his own, from playing basketball with Barack Obama, to stumbling onto a crime scene of Dennis Rader's, the BTK serial killer.

In 2006, Poe wrote an influential commentary on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, while serving as a writer, researcher and editor at The Atlantic magazine.