Indeed, the envisioning of Wikipedia as the sum of all human knowledge is an historical continuation of
earlier encyclopedias that set up a particular relationship between the expert and the layperson, the non-expert, or the learner, as the receivers of knowledge.
The very definition of the encyclopedia is that it is comprehensive ‒ that it holds a summary of all information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch.
That encyclopedias describe themselves as representing all that is known reflects a particular understanding of knowledge that implicitly rejects the idea that some knowledge cannot (and perhaps should not) be known to all.
