Diderot and d’Alembert’s encyclopedic project sought to compile all human knowledge and promote its dissemination in the Enlightenment spirit of transforming thought. As a hegemonic, universalizing movement, the categorization of knowledge also produced normativity while claiming neutrality. Wikipedia emerged from a similarly democratizing impulse, developing community mechanisms to promote accuracy, often at the cost of excluding ambiguity/fuzzyness, indeterminacy/muzzyness - very important pieces for activating imagination. Can what encyclopedizes also be used to decyclopedize?

This question triggered the project Para uma Validação de Ornitorrinquices (ParVO) [For a Validation of Platypuses] . ParVO emerged within the Breaking the Code project as a “hack” of the encyclopedic algorithm [1]. By mobilizing subversive strategies and tactics within the Wikimedia ecosystem, we (un)learn [2], [3] and challenge encyclopedic normativity in favor of situated knowledge [4], [5], as well as environmental and intersectional concerns [6], [7], within Arts Education and Research (AER). Yet decyclopedization remains superficial if it does not engage in the history of its own struggle. It is in this sense that we propose ParVO, with the visualization query platform, ecHoImages for historicizing encyclopedic knowledge and its underlying structures. Thus, we begin with the question:

What historical-critical lines link these projects’ central role in organizing knowledge— from the Diderot-d'Alembert’s Encyclopédie to Wikipedia?

In this communication, we present a digital platform prototype for AER, that embraces error as a pedagogical and investigative catalyst. Within this same framework, we archive encyclopedic artifacts to historicize this gesture of totalizing knowledge, compiling knowledge, and establishing the universal [3], [8], [9], [10].

Accordingly, we are developing an archival platform that supports situated narratives, such as critiques of universalizing knowledge apparatuses, grounded in declared positionalities and intersectional perspectives. While we mobilize error and transgression as didactic and narrative ignition points, we also advance critical readings of what presents itself as neutral or natural. This counter-history that we bring is articulated recursively within the very structures of encyclopedic knowledge systems, whose logics have self-reproduced/disseminated across time and space.

For this talk, we present three cases featured on our platform that help us think through archives of decyclopedic practices in arts education: Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, the Whole Earth Catalog (WEC), and Wikipedia. Together with the platypus, a creature that challenged eighteenth-century taxonomies, these objects will serve as lenses for examining normative structures and their exclusionary processes.

Methodologically, the project adopts an alternative epistemic framework that challenges normativity and treats error as a condition of knowledge production. While error is often integrated into creative processes in digital and audiovisual arts, applying it to wiki systems, structured by taxonomic logics and encyclopedic norms, makes visible the fault lines of knowledge organization. ParVO therefore incorporates error as a methodological and pedagogical tool, challenging epistemic normativity and inviting users to explore non-standard classifications. From a technological standpoint, ParVO relies on a semantic data structure that deliberately introduces ambiguity. While it is partially aligned with Wikidata, it also cultivates an alternative knowledge vocabulary through unconventional taxonomic moves (e.g., incorporating kinship structures into currency classifications, or designing fictional taxonomies inspired by Jorge L. Borges). Thus, ParVO fosters critical engagement with digital and encyclopedic infrastructures, highlighting their roles in knowledge validation and classification. Furthermore, the platform articulates with ecHoImages, which criticizes the environmental and social impact of imaging technologies, advocating for a media ecology and the transition from data to capta [11], and emphasizing the construction of narratives over presumed objectivity. Through ecHoImages, we can query, visualize, and analyze graphs and spacetime information, tracing historical lines of encyclopedization. It also functions as a storytelling device for building counter-narratives. We have been exploring these tools with researchers and students in arts education. By deploying these tools and frameworks as a history of the present [12] of encyclopedization, we aim to identify the discursive rules that have enabled hegemonic knowledge projects such as encyclopedias, popular DIY magazines, and Wikipedia. We begin with three paradigmatic cases - the Encyclopédie, the Whole Earth Catalog (WEC), and Wikipedia - as entry points for historicizing encyclopedization. We seek an operative vocabulary capable of mapping the discursive forces through which these objects became emergent and dominant in specific times and places. At the same time, we aim to recover other possibilities for situated knowledge and for resistance that open space for speculation and imagination about alternative modes of knowing, particularly within arts education.

Observing these three cases through this methodological lens helps us better understand the historical encyclopedic structures that shape us today. We do so by subverting the very digital infrastructure that supports Wikipedia, and by examining the implications of this gesture for teaching, particularly in the arts. In doing so, we open a space to explore the encyclopedic apparatus as a place for artistic practice. We first discuss the controlled vocabulary required for decyclopedization and the semantic structuring it entails. We then outline an archiving workflow in both technical and conceptual terms, addressing what a digital archive can become between Wikibase and Wikidata, and between situated and universal knowledge. Ultimately, this project reimagines digital platforms as spaces for artistic intervention and epistemic critique, expanding their function beyond the production of encyclopedic knowledge.

[1]T. Assis, D. Marques, L. Trigo, V. Moitinho, and A. Barbosa, “Decyclopeding: Provoking the error in arts education through a wikimedia-based platform,” in EDULEARN25 Proceedings, 2025, pp. 2844–2852. doi: 10.21125/edulearn.2025.0786. [2]J. Baldacchino, Art as Unlearning. Routledge, 2018. doi: 10.4324/9780429454387. [3]A. Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. Verso, 2019. [4]D. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Fem. Stud., vol. 14, no. 3, p. 575, 1988, doi: 10.2307/3178066. [5]S. Calvert, “Situated Data: Feminist Epistemology and Data Curation,” 2023. [6]K. Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” Univ. Chic. Leg. Forum, no. 1, 1989. [7]K. Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Rev., vol. 43, no. 6, pp. 1241–1299, 1991, doi: 10.2307/1229039. [8]M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge. Harper & Row, 1976. [9]A. L. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton University Press, 2009. doi: 10.2307/j.ctt7rtrg. [10]J. Derrida and E. Prenowitz, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 9–63, 1995, doi: 10.2307/465144. [11]J. Drucker, “Humanities approaches to graphical display,” Digit. Humanit. Q., vol. 5, no. 1, 2011. [12]M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish : the Birth of the Prison. Pantheon Books, 1977.