Talk:List of encyclopedias

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This needs to be merged with the list in encyclopedia. --Eloquence 15:47 Jan 11, 2003 (UTC)

I'm in the process of moving the list out of encyclopedia, which is currently just a list of external links, and onto this page. As soon as I create homes for those links (ie, stub articles), I'll remove the list from encyclopedia. -- Stephen Gilbert 17:54 Jan 11, 2003 (UTC)

Disagree strongly with merging the list of from encyclopedias here. These are / should be primarily current, to illustrate various subject, national, etc. encyclopedias. The list in encyclopedia is largely historical encyclopedias; including it here would entirely obscure the historical element, the timeline, as well as the national organization. I will look for ways to reformat the list in encyclopedia. flux.books 10:16, 19 October 2005 (UTC)
Both lists revised to address this issue and reflect those concepts. Hopefully that makes a clear distinction for the two lists and how they would be used. flux.books 14:16, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

I say merge the list in the encyclopedia article into this one and just have a link. An article on encyclopedias should not be its own almanac. HereToHelp (talk) 14:20, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

2005/9/27 - My friend L'il Abner tells me he favahs havin' a sep'rate otticle to list encyclopeediahs on accoun' o' how wun day each elemen' o' the list will be fleshed out an' it'll all look like a real otticle. Bless y'all and come enjoy some Dogpatch ham wid us soon. -- PingPongBoy

Eloquence, how do you determine the order if you rank by popularity? I see several problems, not the least of which is cultural bias. The most popular encyclopedia in China will likely have more readers than Britannica.

Alphabetical ordering may not convey much information about the encyclopedias themselves, but it allows people to find scan the list easily and place new links, which is more useful than a vague popularity/volume order. As the list expands, I'd like to see a topical organization develop, which would be more useful than straight alphabetical. -- Stephen Gilbert 19:08 Jan 20, 2003 (UTC)

Encyclopedias that need articles:

I moved them to the article. In the Talk page these useful links are just cleverly hidden.--Keichwa 08:41 May 4, 2003 (UTC)

That's the idea. List pages like this provide links to Wikipedia articles, not external pages. The best thing to do would be to write up small articles for each of these encyclopedias and include the external links there. If you don't feel like it, don't worry. It's on my to do list. :) -- Stephen Gilbert 15:44 May 5, 2003 (UTC)

Can we use the text of http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10092a.htm in Wikipedia? The copyright notice says: The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume X. Copyright © 1911 by Robert Appleton Company. Online Edition Copyright © 2002 by Kevin Knight. olivier 03:25 Jan 14, 2003 (UTC)

Yeah, I think the copyright protection term already expired. But the problem is "Online Edition Copyright 2002". Can we really use it? -- Taku 03:44 Jan 14, 2003 (UTC)

This has come up before. If I remember right we chose to accept the 2002 copyright at face value since the quality of their text isn't worth a fight. But there is no harm at all in asking. See Wikipedia:Boilerplate request for permission. --mav 08:23 Jan 15, 2003 (UTC)

The Catholic Encyclopedia is highly biased. Please do not dump their material in Wikipedia. --Eloquence 08:36 Jan 15, 2003 (UTC)

I disagree. Wikipedia should envy the Catholic Encyclopedia. I am an atheist, and I know that George Smith, author of Atheism: The Case Against God has a similar opinion of the Catholic Encyclopdia. Obviously if we copy their statement that all Christians are obliged to obey the pope, that violates NPOV. But many of their articles on philosophy, geography, history, comparative religion, and, in a few cases, science, are good. Michael Hardy 01:40 Jan 26, 2003 (UTC)
I'm in the middle. I've never really studied the Catholic encyclopedia, so I don't know if is biased or not. If it isn't, use the data and paraphrase it (don't cut and paste even if it IS in the PD). If it is...it's still a good source to look at. HereToHelp (talk) 14:20, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] EncycloZine

Wik, is there any reason you keep removing EncycloZine from this page? As there is an article on EncycloZine, I can't see what your objection is. Angela 20:09, Oct 26, 2003 (UTC)

It is not an encyclopaedia. --Wik 20:22, Oct 26, 2003 (UTC)
If it's not an encylopaedia, what is it? Mintguy
A bookshop. --Wik 20:32, Oct 26, 2003 (UTC)
It contains over 1000 encyclopedia articles and calls itself an encyclopedia. Just because it happens to list books as well does not mean it can not be included. Your personal POV that it is junk is irrelevant. Angela 20:35, Oct 26, 2003 (UTC)
It is not just my POV that it is junk as an encyclopaedia. Of course people may still enjoy it as a bookshop, or as a website. But words have meanings. What is really irrelevant is what it calls itself. If it called itself an elephant, would we write that in the article? Those 1,000 articles are clearly only cheap instruments to drive traffic to the site, whose basic purpose is selling books. --Wik 20:43, Oct 26, 2003 (UTC)
I take your point, and agree with it - It's primary purpose is to sell books and posters. But then the Guinness Book of Records primary purpose it to market the name Guinness and sell more beer, the primary reason for the creation of the Pears Cyclopaedia was to sell more soap, etc.. Mintguy 20:50, 26 Oct 2003 (UTC)
.. A link to Amazon suggests it's a bookshop but it has encylopaedic articles such as http://kosmoi.com/Health/Medicine/Anatomy/ and http://artzia.com/History/Mythology/ and even has some articles which cite Wikipedia as a source. It looks remarkably like it qualifies as an encylopaedia to me. Mintguy 20:37, 26 Oct 2003 (UTC)
A link to Amazon is probably just a means of generating revenue for the site. Linking to Amazon and being an encyclopedia are not mutually exclusive. Mintguy is right that the articles do make it an encyclopedia. Angela 20:46, Oct 26, 2003 (UTC)
"A" link? Have you actually looked at the site? I see this as primarily a bookshop, with accompanying articles. It seems absurd to place trivialities like this in a list together with the most monumental scholarly works, considering that websites that could be described as encyclopaedias by your definition are a dime a dozen, and if all were added the real ones would be hardly discernible in the junk. I will not revert the page again if I'm in the minority, but I'd like to put this up for a vote. --Wik 22:25, Oct 26, 2003 (UTC)

It seems like it's violating GFDL as well. I don't think we need to give it any traffic, unless it's from an article specifically mentioning the violation of the license. Dori 22:52, Oct 26, 2003 (UTC)

So we should punish them for breaking the GFDL by making this article less complete? Anyway, the pages I looked at all said "This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, which means that you can copy it and modify it so long as the entire work remains under this license. It uses material from the Wikipedia article WikiWiki, so they appear to be adhering to the licence. Angela 23:05, Oct 26, 2003 (UTC)
My mistake. I saw some articles that did not have the notice and some that did, and I assumed that all that content was coming from Wikipedia. In light of this, I am going neutral. Dori 23:26, Oct 26, 2003 (UTC)

On Wikipedia:Announcements it says that Romanian Wikipedia and Hebrew Wikipedia have both reached 1,000 articles. Does that mean that they are not worthy of being called encyclopaedias? The fact that it is advertising wares as well as providing information is irrelevant, most commercial TV stations do the same. Mintguy 23:27, 26 Oct 2003 (UTC)

The semantical dispute on what should be called an encyclopaedia misses the point. We have also a List of people and it goes without saying that it is supposed to be a list of notable people. Random people who add their own name there are routinely removed. And similarly I think this should be a list of notable encyclopaedias, not just anything that somehow could be called an encyclopaedia. Given that most of it is copied from public-domain materials, the little original content of EncycloZine is of minimal importance. As usual with stuff like this, the article EncycloZine and its entry in this article were added by no one else but the creator of EncycloZine himself (Alan Richmond). I'm sure no one else would ever have done so. This is just another case of Boyeristic self-promotion. --Wik 00:17, Oct 27, 2003 (UTC)

It is notable. There is an article on it. Only people without an article would be removed from the List of people. Angela 01:18, Oct 27, 2003 (UTC)
Are you reading me? The article was put up by the EncycloZine creator himself. Or are you getting technical now, and suggesting I have to get the article deleted first? I thought it was easier to start with this entry here. Boyer was also deleted from the List of people while his article was still being discussed. --Wik 01:32, Oct 27, 2003 (UTC)

EncycloZine describes itself as an encyclopedia, and I see no grounds to dispute this description. Plus, a few other respectable sources like it, such as New Scientist and BUBL. -- Stephen Gilbert 10:30, 27 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I founded EncycloZine in 1998 as an exercise in XHTML (it was the web's first XHTML site), and as an encyclopedia comprising articles I'd written on astronomy and web development, and later, articles Lucy and I wrote or commissioned. My motivation (not that it should be relevant) was always primarily intellectual. The commercial aspect became necessary when we lost most of our capital (from the sale of WDVL.com) in the tech crash. We added Amazon books not only to generate revenue, but also to add value for our users - i.e. to help them identify books relevant to specific topics. We *never* started with the notion of creating websites for commercial gain. Contrary to opinions expressed, it's primarily a labor of love, that we happen to make some money from. I've worked on it full time since 1998, and I'm very pleased that several respectable sources, and librarians, educators, and students appreciate it. Most of our traffic is to our original articles; many are linked from educational/school sites. Before I added it to Wikipedia, I checked out the other entries, and I was quite satisfied that EncycloZine stood up well against some of the other entries. We're not Britannica, but then, we don't require subscription (and I think younger folks and others find us easier to use). It is *not* mostly Wikipedia articles - I would guess they make up about half the total. Our most popular articles contain very few from Wikipedia. And I see us as adding value with the recommended books and our classification structure. BTW we've added GFDL links to all the pages we could find that omitted it. Also, I have a list of subject encyclopedias that might be useful for this list. -- Alan Richmond

I add Alan's statement to my argument for inclusion. We should assume good faith until proven otherwise. Also, add another source that considers EncycloZine an encyclopedia: the Librarians' Index to the Internet [1] -- Stephen Gilbert 23:35, 4 Nov 2003 (UTC)
It's an encyclopedia of encyclopedias. I don't know which way to go on this one, but I'll lean towards keep because Wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedia so space isn't much of an issue. HereToHelp (talk) 14:24, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Include EncycloZine in List of encyclopedias vote

Yes:

  1. Angela
  2. Ellmist - mention that it has about 1,000 articles and numerous affiliate links
  3. Mintguy
  4. Fred Bauder 05:29, 27 Oct 2003 (UTC)
  5. Stephen Gilbert
  6. Alan Richmond
  7. Patrick
  8. HereToHelp (talk), but only mildly so. Wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedia so we don't need to save space--but that's about all of my argument.

No:

  1. Wik
  2. Apwoolrich Not as this EncycloZine list stands. The reason why the WP list is divided by centuries and subjects is that it enables readers to target titles more easily. If a merger is done then the EncycloZine list needs to be sorted to account for this. The present form of the WP list was done after all these votes were cast.
  3. No, as it's not a useful suggestion to a user of wikipedia, in the way the other works are. The point of wikipedia is not simply to be a huge list of everything that might be includable under some topic list. (Machines can do that far better than we, that's what Yahoo etc. are for.) It's meant to be a useful reference of knowledge, in a structured and edited format. Open, yes, but not incoherent and not a rote list of sites. Whereas, someone might actually find it useful to turn up an obscure site on (for example) gun identification (moved from the encyclopedia artice) - though I'm personally not fond of it, thats the sort of thing wiki can do that the britannica and americana can't do. flux.books 14:26, 19 October 2005 (UTC)
  4. filthy_swine I don't see any other encyclopedias marketing posters about an article one has just read. You can call it creative financing, but I call it the whole reason for the site.

Neutral:

  1. Dori

[edit] Where from here?

This list is a mess, regardless of all previous discussion  :) , things are not easily retrievable, there is no proper alpha sort under some headins, and so on. someone needs to either clean up the 'others' or the point of either being an example or comprehensive falls flat! vcxlor 04:23, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Bibliotheke

The article that the book from the list links to appears to be a different book of the same name.--Filthy swine 21:35, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Where to add?

Where should I add the recently-released Encyclopedia of Domestic Animation, if anywhere? Esn 07:39, 20 April 2007 (UTC)