by Ari Davis

SPECIFIC ONLINE ENCYCLOPEDIAS

Bad Examples:

Compton's Encyclopedia: http://www.comptons.com

Compton's Encyclopedia Online seems to belong to the past. When viewed recently, it had apparently not been updated since early 2000; Current Events featured news stories from March 2000, and Web links and teaching resources were no longer being maintained. This gradual withering away will be a loss since, despite its less sophisticated style intended for the home and school market, Compton's offered animated films and slide shows and several other interesting multimedia features. It was a very poor example of an online encyclopedia.

Africana: http://www.africana.com

A sister Microsoft Web site, African.com, tantalizes with the possibility of some articles drawn from the popular Encyclopedia Africana, ed. by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, and from its companion CD-ROM, Encarta Africana. However, Africana.com serves primarily as a portal for events and topics about Africa or of interest to the African American community. Searches for encyclopedia content retrieve only promotional ads for the print or CD-ROM publication.

Infonautics Encyclopedia: http://www.enyclopedia.com

Infonautics, Encyclopedia.com grabbed the most obvious domain name of the bunch, but its 14,000 very brief articles drawn from the Concise Columbia Encyclopedia (3rd edition, 1994) seem to serve primarily as teasers to entice users to purchase related documents and images from the vendor's Electric Library service. The site uses very primitive links and images and is not very appealing visually.

Nupedia.com: http://www.nupedia.com

There are some new types of encyclopedias being launched on the Net such as Nupedia.com, launched in Spring 2000, it is an intriguing idea that has not yet been realized: an "open source" encyclopedia inviting articles from volunteer experts and editors. Editor-in-chief and Ohio State philosophy graduate student Larry Sanger started Nupedia with the goal of creating the "largest general encyclopedia in history" but, as of yet, only a few articles on musicological topics were available. Nupedia is a little too new to be useful.