In January 1995,Project Gutenberg started to publish theASCII text of theEncyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition (1911), but disagreements about the method halted the work after the first volume. Fortrademark reasons, the text had been published as the Gutenberg Encyclopedia.[2] Since then, Project Gutenbergdigitized and proofread the encyclopedia, until the last update in September 2018. Project Gutenberg published volumes in alphabetical order; the most recent publication isVolume 17 Slice 1: "Lord Chamberlain" to "Luqman", published on August 9, 2013.[3] The latestBritannica was digitized by its publishers, and sold first as aCD-ROM,[4] and later as an online service.[5]
In 2001, ASCII text of all 28 volumes was published onEncyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition[6] by source; acopyright claim was added to the materials included. Thewebsite no longer exists.
Other websites provide online encyclopedias, some of which are also available onWikisource or theInternet Archive. However, some may be more complete than others, or may be from different editions.
Another early online encyclopedia was called theGlobal Encyclopedia. In November 1995, James Rettig, Assistant Dean of University Libraries for Reference and Information Services atCollege of William & Mary, presented an unfavorable review at the 15th AnnualCharleston Conference on library acquisitions and related issues. He said of theGlobal Encyclopedia:[9]
This is a volunteer effort to compile an encyclopedia and distribute it for free on the World Wide Web. 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". These editors (to use that title very loosely) have generated a list of approximately 1,300 topics they want to include; to date, perhaps a quarter of them have been treated. ... This so-called encyclopedia gives amateurism a bad name. It is being compiled without standards or guidelines for article structure, content, or reading level. It makes no apparent effort to check the qualifications and authority of the volunteer authors. Its claim that "Submitted articles are fact-checked, corrected for spelling, and then formatted" is at best an exaggeration.[9]
A city of approximately 60,000 people, Iowa City lies in the eastern half of Iowa. It is also the home of the University of Iowa (http://www.uiowa.edu).[9]
Other similar encyclopedia projects included the privately ownedNupedia, created in March 2000 by the dot-com companyBomis, andGNUpedia, a free content project created in January 2001 under the auspices of theFree Software Foundation.[10][11] Both projects are now defunct.
The concept of an online encyclopedia, labelled the "world encyclopaedia" and inspired by theWorld Brain essays ofH. G. Wells, was considered by one of the creators of theViewdata system,Samuel Fedida, as a potential application for this new medium. Leveraging the hierarchical structure of Viewdata pages or frames, Fedida envisaged frames at higher or more shallow levels in the medium covering topics in a simpler fashion, and those at lower or deeper levels introducing steadily greater complexity in their coverage. He also acknowledged a need for an "ability to add cross-references", and that this might change the Viewdata paradigm. Writing in 1979, he noted that substantial practical obstacles remained for such an online resource, estimating the need for low latency storage of around "one hundred million megabyte", equivalent to more than 100,000 of the largest disks available at that time.[12]
Because of Wikipedia's liberal content licensing policy,content forks of Wikipedia can be created without needing permission. A number offorks of Wikipedia exist, created with a variety of different goals, including those created to further political viewpoints. Major examples include online encyclopedias supporting state ideologies such as the Russian Wikipedia forkRuviki, China's open-content Wikipedia forkQiuwen Baike, andBaidu Baike, a mostly locally created Chinese encyclopedia built partly on Wikipedia content.[14][15][16]
A number of small wiki-based encyclopedias have been created to advocate for niche political or religious goals; these includeConservapedia,RationalWiki, andCitizendium.
