The texts considered here can be read as a collective argument about how modern knowledge is never merely produced by isolated minds, but assembled through infrastructures: encyclopaedias, atlases, metadata schemas, buildings, curricula, platforms, markets, emotions, biological materials and institutional routines. Diderot’s Enlightenment project already frames knowledge as a public, reorganising force: the Encyclopédie sought not simply to collect facts, but to “change the common way of thinking”, dissolving the boundary between craft, science, philosophy and politics. This ambition reappears in contemporary form in the DataCite Metadata Schema, which turns research outputs into discoverable, citable and reusable entities through mandatory properties such as Identifier, Creator, Title, Publisher, PublicationYear and ResourceType. Wikipedia extends the same democratic aspiration into participatory digital practice, presenting knowledge as a commons maintained through verifiability, neutrality, citation and collective correction. Yet Daston and Galison complicate any innocent faith in knowledge systems by showing that even “objectivity” is historical: scientific seeing is shaped by epistemic virtues, instruments, atlases and disciplined selves. Their account of Arthur Worthington’s transition from idealised symmetrical splash drawings to mechanically recorded irregular photographs reveals that truth, objectivity and judgement are not timeless absolutes but practices of seeing, selecting and authorising. Knowledge, therefore, is never pure information; it is always mediated by standards, tools, genres, images and ethical disciplines. Wolfe and Shank on Diderot, the Wikimedia Foundation, DataCite, and Daston and Galison together suggest that modern knowledge depends on infrastructures that make things visible, transmissible and credible, while also determining what remains excluded, marginal or illegible.
