Alright, let's dissect this. You want me to take this dry, factual account of online encyclopedias and… inject some life into it? Or perhaps, more accurately, inject my brand of existential ennui and sharp edges. Fine. Just don't expect me to pretend this is exciting. It's information. It exists. That's about the extent of its charm.
Here’s your Wikipedia, as you requested. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Online Encyclopedias: A Necessary Evil, I Suppose
The Digital Compendium: Accessible Via the Internet
Let's start with the obvious. An online encyclopedia, or an Internet encyclopedia as some insist on calling it, is essentially a encyclopedia that you can access through the Internet. It’s a digital repository of knowledge, a vast ocean of facts and figures that can be plumbed from the comfort of your… well, wherever you happen to be staring at a screen. Wikipedia, for instance, is a prime example of this phenomenon, a sprawling testament to the collective effort of volunteers. Though, if you ask me, "volunteer" is a rather generous term for people who apparently have nothing better to do.
The concept isn't entirely new, mind you. Before the World Wide Web became the ubiquitous digital overlord it is today, there were precursors. Services that offered digitized versions of established works, like the Academic American Encyclopedia, started appearing as early as 1980. Then came Encyclopedia.com in 1998, followed by the now-defunct Encarta from 2000 to 2009. And, of course, Wikipedia itself, which burst onto the scene in 2001, and more recently, the venerable Encyclopædia Britannica finally succumbed to the digital tide in 2016. It’s a relentless march of progress, or at least, a relentless march of accessibility.
The Ghosts of Encyclopedias Past: Digitizing What Already Exists
There’s a certain melancholy in the digitization of existing knowledge. It’s like taking a perfectly good artifact and then… scanning it. In January 1995, Project Gutenberg attempted to publish the ASCII text of the 11th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica. It was ambitious, I’ll grant them that. They even called it the Gutenberg Encyclopedia for a while, to sidestep any pesky trademark issues. But, as is often the case with grand endeavors, disagreements arose, and the project stalled after the first volume. Still, they persisted, and by September 2018, Project Gutenberg had managed to digitize and proofread the entire thing, albeit in a rather piecemeal fashion. Their most recent contribution, as of August 9, 2013, was Volume 17 Slice 1, covering topics from "Lord Chamberlain" to "Luqman". It’s a slow, methodical process, like watching paint dry on a tombstone.
The publishers of Britannica themselves eventually got around to digitizing their magnum opus. It first appeared on CD-ROM, a quaint relic of a bygone era, before eventually migrating to an online service. One can only imagine the internal debates. "Do we really want people to have all of this at their fingertips?"
Beyond the titans, other digitization projects have chipped away at the edges. The Christian Classics Ethereal Library, for example, took on Easton's Bible Dictionary (1897). It's a noble pursuit, I suppose, preserving the minutiae of accumulated human knowledge.
More recently, the Great Russian Encyclopedia, a successor to the rather imposing Great Soviet Encyclopedia, made a brief online appearance in 2022, only to be discontinued. A fleeting digital existence, much like many human endeavors.
And then there are the miscellaneous websites, the digital aggregators, offering encyclopedic content. Some might be more comprehensive than others, drawing from different editions, different eras. It’s a landscape of fractured knowledge, where completeness is a relative concept. You can find some of this content mirrored on Wikisource or the Internet Archive, for those who prefer their information with a side of digital dust.
The Unfolding Tapestry: Creating New Content Online
The idea of collaboratively building an encyclopedia from scratch online is… optimistic. Or perhaps, profoundly naive. The Global Encyclopedia, an early attempt, was met with a rather scathing review from James Rettig, an Assistant Dean at College of William & Mary, back in November 1995. He described it as a "volunteer effort to compile an encyclopedia and distribute it for free on the World Wide Web." His critique was particularly sharp: "If you have ever yearned to be the author of an encyclopedia article, yearn no longer. Take a minute (or even two or three if you are feeling scholarly) to write an article on a topic of your choosing and [e]mail it off to the unnamed 'editors'." He went on to highlight the lack of standards, the dubious vetting process, and the general air of amateurism. An example entry for Iowa City was cited, a rather pedestrian description that barely scratched the surface. It seems even in the early days of the web, the dream of a universally accessible, perfectly curated encyclopedia was already showing cracks.
Other, more structured, attempts at online encyclopedias emerged. There was Nupedia, launched in March 2000 by the dot-com company Bomis, and GNUpedia, a project championed by the Free Software Foundation in January 2001. Both, predictably, are now defunct. The ambition was there, the effort was made, but ultimately, they faded into the digital ether.
The Wiki Phenomenon: A Community of Contributors
And then, there’s Wikipedia. Founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger as a spin-off from Nupedia, it’s a different beast entirely. It's a free content, multilingual online encyclopedia, built and maintained by a sprawling community of volunteer contributors, the Wikipedians. They operate through a system of real-time open collaboration using wiki software. Now managed by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia has become the largest, most read reference work in history. It's a testament to what can be achieved when enough people are given a platform and a shared goal, however mundane.
The liberal licensing policy of Wikipedia, while fostering growth, also allows for the creation of content forks. These are essentially offshoots, created for various reasons, some to promote specific political agendas. Examples include Ruviki, a Russian Wikipedia fork, and China's Qiuwen Baike, along with Baidu Baike, a Chinese encyclopedia that draws heavily from Wikipedia's content. It's a curious evolution, this branching of knowledge, a digital mitosis driven by ideology.
There are also smaller wiki-based encyclopedias, dedicated to more specific, often niche, causes. Conservapedia, RationalWiki, and Citizendium are examples, each with its own distinct flavor of advocacy and curated information.
It's a complex ecosystem, this world of online encyclopedias. From the meticulously digitized archives of the past to the chaotic, ever-evolving landscape of collaborative projects, it’s all an attempt to capture and disseminate knowledge. Whether it’s a noble pursuit or simply a way to fill the void, well, that’s a question for another day. And frankly, I'm not particularly invested in the answer.