How Much of the World's Knowledge is Readily Available on the Internet?

I figure it's about 2%. This is an astonishing number to me -- meaning knowledge available right now to any human with an internet connection.

Though my estimate was a complete shock to a young nephew who believed that ALL human knowledge was available on the Internet.

What's your estimate?

What counts as knowledge?

Does it include all thoughts people have? If so, including people who are dead?

unfortunately an unknown amount of knowledge though history has been lost?
for example. how exactly were those giant megalithic stones, building blocks, moved? some weighing an estimated 1000 to 1600 tons.

As a percentage of living human knowledge, as in common knowledge rather than things like personal history, I’d guess about 5% give or take depending on how deeply you look, is readily available. For all human knowledge on the internet, which may require some intense digging, that might come closer to 50%, but likely significantly less.

The categories of things are varied. If you include some categories, the estimate gets larger, others and it gets smaller.

If I include the placement of chairs in this room, the internet will know absolutely nothing. The same with the actual shape of the river.

Is this “human knowledge” or “natural knowledge”, though?

Words can only contain so much—in the end they become misleading.

How are you folks coming up with those percentages?

Is that the amount that has been loaded or entered somewhere?

I'm with the crowd, very little of it is. No guess of a number. I'd label a lot of what the net does know as first level information. "A goat is a ruminant" Factual, surface knowledge. "Goats are hard to keep fenced in."  Surface.  Goat motivations, the motivations of a particular goat, what about abnormal goats? (Gotta admit, most goats are abnormal!!)
Surface, first level info it has. "Knowledge" no.

Yep. I maintain that every description of reality is a simplification, and a lot of the information online is a description of a description of reality, if not even farther removed from the real thing. Even the simple-seeming stuff, where you can probably find a million "how-to" videos or articles online in about five seconds. Even if you read or watched all of them, I'm willing to bet that there's a lot you still won't know about the subject, because it's too subtle to be put into words, or because the only way to that knowledge is to do it for a few years, or because just a few people in the world have realized that particular thing and they're not the ones writing online tutorials...

Throughout much of time, certain knowledge was a prized secret passed down from one person to another. Huge amounts of that knowledge was lost when the next generation wasn't there to learn it from childhood, often because it wasn't seen as significant in a changing world.

It's interesting what archeologists are discovering with modern tools, only to have the discoveries raise more questions, rather than give answers.

Christopher Weeks wrote:What counts as knowledge?

Does it include all thoughts people have? If so, including people who are dead?

Phew, thorny question. But fair. If you don't ask the right question you don't get the right answer.

I rather like the definition of knowledge at oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com: "the information, understanding and skills that you gain through education or experience."

I like to think of knowledge as curated information and skills that expand and enhance understanding and inform useful or meaningful actions.

Knowledge has more "signal" than "noise." A snarky Reddit post that does not add value or advance human understanding qualifies as "noise" to me.

Raw data is not knowledge, but rather is raw material that can be converted into knowledge.

Dead people still speak wisdom and insight. The entirety of gutenberg.org surely has more signal than noise.

How's that?

I just read that about 10-15% of the world's texts have been digitized, and not all of that is available to the general public. Some requires pay, such as some scientific journals, as an example.
Also, there is much knowledge that is not in text, it's in people's heads.

It may seem like the internet is infinite, but I wonder how much is redundant? You only need one web page to explain how the heart pumps blood, but I bet there are thousands or millions of attempts, as parts of larger learning materials for different audiences.

A bit of a tangent here, but something I have always wondered is just how MUCH information was lost in the as-of-yet never satisfactorally explained burning and subsequent loss of numerous books in the library of Alexandria. Then you have whole other compiled sources of information like the tens of thousands of clay tablets amassed by Ashurbanipal of Assyria in his time. And this is just written down knowledge, no other medium included.

I have absolutely no idea what percentage of all the world's knowledge is actually available on the internet, much less readily available. To tell you the truth I struggle to ever stumble back upon some of the articles, tutorials, how-to sequences, etc that I once worked through just a decade or decade and a half ago. It just seemingly isn't there anymore (and some of it may literally not be on the regular internet any longer, if a server went down or websites expired, etc).

Interesting topic. Huge topic really, haha. And how much is lost over and over and over again each time whole chunks of the world put themselves through yet another onslaught of war, only to lose whole waves of people spanning multiple generations, and if enough of the "right" people are lost each time, people possessing especially more keen or observant minds, or just possessing certain skillsets deemed more "desirable" for their particular time, only to never be rediscovered or happened back onto in one or even a few lifetimes?

Cody Hahn wrote: To tell you the truth I struggle to ever stumble back upon some of the articles, tutorials, how-to sequences, etc that I once worked through just a decade or decade and a half ago. It just seemingly isn't there anymore (and some of it may literally not be on the regular internet any longer, if a server went down or websites expired, etc).  

Me too. I get this weird feeling that the amount of readily available knowledge online is actually decreasing.

Cody Hahn wrote: I have absolutely no idea what percentage of all the world's knowledge is actually available on the internet, much less readily available. To tell you the truth I struggle to ever stumble back upon some of the articles, tutorials, how-to sequences, etc that I once worked through just a decade or decade and a half ago. It just seemingly isn't there anymore (and some of it may literally not be on the regular internet any longer, if a server went down or websites expired, etc).

On this topic I spent about half an hour on the build it solar site recently and found that the majority of the links have been dead for over a decade... All great resources, around half still thankfully available due to the wayback machine. Now that's one site that would remove a huge chunk of knowledge on the internet if it was taken down...

Me too. I get have this weird feeling that the amount of readily available knowledge online is actually decreasing.

Which is more than a little depressing because we should in many ways have it better than ever before, and I sure hope we haven't already hit some sort of sweet spot as far as compiled information and reasonably easy and ready access to said information by the masses (those whom are interested in the first place, that is). Surely not already....................haha.

*This post was edited to clarify that the top/first sentence in this post is actually Douglass'. I botched the "quote" function when trying to reply to his sentence such that it looks like I wrote that sentence, when in fact that is Douglass' sentence, and that's all there is to it.............LOL.

Alex Howell wrote:On this topic I spent about half an hour on the <a href="https://www.builditsolar.com/index.htm">build it solar site</a> recently and found that the majority of the links have been dead for over a decade... All great resources, around half still thankfully available due to the <a href="https://web.archive.org/">wayback machine</a>. Now that's one site that would remove a huge chunk of knowledge on the internet if it was taken down...

I have had similar experiences on the WayBack Machine, and I too am grateful for what can still be reaccessed on that thing from time to time.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:Me too. I get this weird feeling that the amount of readily available knowledge online is actually decreasing.

I think (hope!) that's not really true. And I think that Google is primarily responsible for that sensation by completely screwing the pooch on search in a quest for revenue. Others are certainly involved, but Google is the 800-lb gorilla.

If you take an instructions for screwing a machine screw into a nut. Even if they're thorough -- "righty tighty", helical inclined planes interlocking, hold each bit between thumb and forefinger, slowly engage while turning, etc. Even if there's some page with all of that spelled out. What about that feeling you get when the threads engage or the other ones that happen as you seat the nut and start to get tight and then also when you overtighten? I think that's knowledge that either doesn't lend itself to the media at which the internet excels or we're too lazy to convert it to the written word because it would be a lot of work. And that's just one incredibly simple operation.

I'm a software developer. There's a giant tidal wave of information about how to do most particular tasks in my field available on the net. Less so about when. Less yet about why.

I guess I'm poking at the difference between knowledge and wisdom and I don't know if they're different things or what.