All the Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopaedia

* The gravel: kidney stones.

* The entry runs to around 11,000 words, with 200 references and links. In November 2008 I interviewed Mark Zuckerberg in London. He was twenty-four, and only worth about $3bn then, and Facebook only had around 100 million members (compared to the 2.85 billion active monthly users it claimed in March 2021). He already had his familiar mantra: Facebook is about sharing. ‘The idea was always, tell people, “share more information”,’ he told me. ‘And that way we could gain more understanding about what’s going on with the people around you.’ This was long before the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and all of the other negative Facebook revelations that showed how the illicit harvesting of this shared information could be used for political ends. ‘People have always spent a lot of time communicating, connecting, sharing with the people who are around them and are important to them,’ Zuckerberg continued. ‘It’s a very human thing.’ I asked him where this quest for knowledge began (the popular story was that it began as a way to meet girls). ‘All my friends at school, we always talked about how the world would be better if there was more information available, and if you could understand what was going on with other people more – essentially if people shared more information about themselves.’ Without ever calling it this, he was making the world’s largest self-selecting personal digital encyclopaedia. Not always an accurate one, of course, but a vibrantly active hyperlinked resource.