Small steps will do the job.
When a project is exciting, it is easy to imagine a big contribution that you would like to make, bite off more than you can chew, and ultimately give up with nothing to show for it.
So it is important to welcome and encourage smaller contributions. Writing a textbook for a whole semester's material is a big job, and only a small fraction of teachers will contribute that much. But writing about a topic small enough for one meeting of a class is a contribution that many can afford to make. Enough of these small contributions can cover the whole range of knowledge.
Take the long view.
The encyclopedia is a big job, and it won't be finished in a year. If it takes twenty years to complete the free encyclopedia, that will be but an instant in the history of literature and civilization.
In projects like this, progress is slow for the first few years; then it accelerates as the work that has been done attracts more and more people to join in. Eventually there is an avalanche of progress. So we should not feel discouraged when the first few years do not bring us close to completion. It makes sense to choose the first steps to illustrate what can be done, and to spread interest in the long-term goal, so as to inspire others to join in.
This means that the pioneers' job, in the early years, is above all to be steadfast. We must be on guard against downgrading to a less useful, less idealistic goal, just because of the magnitude of the task. Instead of measuring our early steps against the size of the whole job, we should think of them as examples, and have confidence that they will inspire a growing number of contributors to join and finish the job.
