The encyclopaedic shift

A diagram showing the length of the months in an 8th-century manuscript of Isidore of Seville's Etymologies, a work of encyclopaedic proportions popular throughout the Middle Ages (St Gallen, Cod. Sang. 238, p.325)

For better or worse, Wikipedia is the world's most popular encyclopaedia, whose English version averages around 255 million pageviews a day. …