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Poiesipedia is a free, internet-based, and collaborative encyclopedia project aimed at covering the Possible, the Thinkable, and the Fantastic as opposed to the Real. Its entries (articles, short stories, novels, poems...) are either purely fantastic or referring to something fantastic that was thought of before its inception. Their most basic model is Jorge Louis Borges’ short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” Poiesipedia pursues a twofold aim: on the one side, it aims at enlarging the realm of the Thinkable (“Possible Worlds”), on the other, it strives to codify and expand the English language as the established “Lingua Franca”, the “Vulgar Latin” of today’s globalized world. By encouraging participating individuals to collaborate in creating fantastic stories, Poiesipedia departs from the romantic idea of the Author as an individual genius. Instead, it proposes that collaboratively written stories can achieve a superior variety of outcomes, and hence a deeper exploration of fantastic associations. The related website Poiesipedia.com is free for everybody.

The Philosophy

Poiesipedia is a compendium of the “Possible” as opposed to what is just “Real”. Philosophically it draws as much from the logic of “Possible Worlds” (from Leibniz to Goodman), as from the ancient Greek understanding of “Creation”, as, finally, from the literary theory behind the work of authors such as Poe, Borges and Calvino. According to the logic of “Possible Worlds” the exploration of what is possible, if not to say fantastic, necessarily follows the same epistemic rules required to explore the Real. According to ancient Greek thinking “Creation” (Ποιεσισ/Poiesis) is the act of generating something new by creating new combinations of existing elements, or, at the meta-level, by finding new ways of combining things. According to Poe, Borges, and Calvino, literary fantasy is an act of conscious and rational construction by which the world is enriched of not yet thought of “possibilities” using new logical combinations of letters and words. The proposed interpretation of these three streams of thinking is obviously biased by Postmodernism. This should be made transparent from the outset. And as for the results: Any reader browsing through Poiesipedia might feel like strolling through James Stirling’s Stuttgart State Gallery rather than through the much coveted graphical purity offered by places such as the Elgin Room in the British Museum to the Bauhaus Building in Dessau. That might not fit everybody’s taste, and it neither should. Rather, Poiesipedia consciously caters in a somewhat extreme, surely “purist” way to the passion of certain sophisticated literary readers and writers who have been of recent struggling to find an adequate internet platform.

Origin

The idea to initiate a fantastic Encyclopedia of the possible came about when following the debate about the reliability of Wikipedia, the internet encyclopedia, in the first decade of the current millennium. This debate was based on the assumption that a small group of experts could deliver a better description of the real world than a large group of amateurs. Drawing from its Enlightenment driven origins it also presupposed that “reality” could be explored up to a final and true representation of the universe and its history. While by no means intending to discredit in any form the huge role played by the quest for objectivity against superstition and blind faith, we maintain that this debate was futile. Unfortunately, with the exception of some small parts of the universe that truly seem to follow Newtonian physics, any description and subsequent explanation of the world rests on a set of hypotheses owning to a large extent to the human interpretation of the facts. One only needs to browse trough the various editions of the Britannica since its inception in 1768 (first edition in 1771) to realize it. Rightly, the Britannica cherished itself since 1913 as the “Sum of Human Knowledge” as opposed to the “Sum of World Facts”. The debate ended on August 25th, 2009 with Wikipedia giving in and restricting the editing rights of its many users. Wikipedia’s problem was less one of accuracy. It struggled instead with the outright malevolent intentions of some users trying to manipulate by means of misinformation. And this was and is not acceptable, for the very idea of any Encyclopedia is to strive for objective knowledge. But Wikipedia remains at least in one respect superior to any other: the vastity of the knowledge it mirrors measured by the number of entries. This should not surprise given the thousands of actively participating people and the real time nature of the internet medium. The issue of accuracy and misinformation turned to be a problem for Wikipedia because Wikipedia strives to depict objectively the existing world. This problem does not exist for Poiesipedia for the very reason that it tries to extend the realm of possible, not yet existing worlds. By tapping the fantasy of a worldwide user base, Poiesipedia aims at extending the size of the possible far beyond what was so far achieved by a few gifted individuals. The only and very rule guiding all entries is that they need be strictly fantastic. The may come in the form of encyclopedic entries in the style of Borges’ “Tlön, Uqbar, Obis Tertius”, newly coined new words of a future dictionary, short stories and novels. Also acceptable, but only if properly documented, are referential entries describing interesting already conceived fantastic objects and visions.

Language

Poiesipedia comes primarily in the English language. It is not the Queen’s English however. It is also just potentially, but not necessarily the English spoken and written by native speakers. Rather, and in most cases, it is the “Lingua Franca” spoken and written by non native speakers when interacting across borders and cultures, similar in nature to the “Sermo Vulgaris” (Vulgar Latin) that developed in ancient Roman times. Differently from what happened after the fall of the Roman Empire it is not to be expected that this “Vulgar English” will disintegrate into a full array of new languages, at least not as long as the internet will continue to provide a platform for its continuous development and documentation. However, it is to be expected that this language will develop with increasing speed a dynamic on its own. Similar to what national literatures performed in the early Middle Age, Poiesipedia aims in this respect at providing a platform for this development, a place where new words can be coined, new combinations put on offer, and potentially new grammar developed. This vision implicitly assumes that the currently observable migration of knowledge development that used to being thought of and documented in several national languages into one single English based “Lingua Franca” is irreversible. This might be hurting for some, but it consequently reflects the current reality. Nevertheless, versions of Poiesipedia in local national languages might well develop over time, and they should. However, their scope will be limited to conserving what used to be a fantastically glorious past.