History
The practice of encyclopedism dates back to the days of the Roman Empire, with Pliny the Elder's Natural History having been one of the earliest extant encyclopedias to survive antiquity.
As with other media practices such as journalism, encyclopedism benefited greatly from the invention of the movable type printing press in Renaissance-era Germany, allowing for a greater number of professionals and libraries to attain cheaper editions of encyclopedias in the following centuries, with revised editions of encyclopedic series being issued every few years. But by the 20th century, encyclopedias were increasingly criticized for being verbally inaccessible to younger audiences and lacking in recent updates regarding topics.
One of the earliest individuals to advocate for a technologically enhanced encyclopedia indexing all the world's information was H. G. Wells, who put forward his idea of a World Encyclopedia in his essay World Brain. Others would put forward similar ideas, but a significant revolution in encyclopedism would not take place until after the advent of the personal computer, the Internet and the World Wide Web in the late 20th century. Hypermedia-based encyclopedias were released on CD-ROM in the 1990s, most of the text of which was directly copied from recent editions of print editions but was also enhanced by the addition of video, audio and interactive media.
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