Cabinet of Curiosities
Cabinets of curiosities are rooms or boxes of display cases for keeping and presenting "interesting" stuff.
There's a very long tradition of libraries and strange relics in the Christian church, but cabinets of more general curiosities really got going in 17th and 18th centuries (see [1] or [2]). This was when horizons were rapidly expanding and there was an appetite for all the amazing, strange things that were cropping up as people travelled about. The more amazing and obscure the better. Mysterious new flora and fauna, things that reflected the weird practices of other people, odd historical and cultural artefacts, medical samples, deeply personal keepsakes, anything that didn't fit the norm and felt like it should be preserved.
People's collections served a few purposes. Like collecting stamps or bottle tops or eggs, they were a simple form of recreation. They generated interest and brought exotic things to life - the popular entertainment of its time. They represented knowledge in the form of a riddle, and by curating (organising and presenting) objects and their stories, some deeper truth might be revealed. They acted like an archive or a reference, a springboard for making more knowledge. And, of course, the collectors were also reflecting themselves and their way of looking at things to people who came to look. As if they were presenting the inside of their brain to the world.
Cabinets of curiosities soon produced the first museums (e.g. the Ashmolean in Oxford was built to house one family's famous curiosity collection) and the tradition is still alive and well all over the world on shelves in everybody's houses and in galleries, universities, historical monuments, a lot of books, even in things like fashion and shops and the long tail of the internet.
So this may be a good way to think of a wiki: a cabinet of curiosities/museum, archive and junk shop, much in the way that Vannevar Bush regarded his Memex.
