Encyclopedia

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Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For other uses, see Encyclopedia (disambiguation).

The volumes of the 15th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica (and the volume for the year 2002) span two bookshelves in a library.
Title page of Lucubrationes, 1541 edition, one of the first books to use a variant of the word encyclopedia in the title

An encyclopedia (American English) or encyclopædia (British English) is a reference work or compendium providing summaries of knowledge either general or special to a particular field or discipline.[1][2] Encyclopedias are divided into articles or entries that are arranged alphabetically by article name[3] or by thematic categories, or else are hyperlinked and searchable.[4] Encyclopedia entries are longer and more detailed than those in most dictionaries.[3][5] Generally speaking, encyclopedia articles focus on factual information concerning the subject named in the article's title;[5] this is unlike dictionary entries, which focus on linguistic information about words, such as their etymology, meaning, pronunciation, use, and grammatical forms.[5][6][7][8][9]

Encyclopedias have existed for around 2,000 years and have evolved considerably during that time as regards language (written in a major international or a vernacular language), size (few or many volumes), intent (presentation of a global or a limited range of knowledge), cultural perspective (authoritative, ideological, didactic, utilitarian), authorship (qualifications, style), readership (education level, background, interests, capabilities), and the technologies available for their production and distribution (hand-written manuscripts, small or large print runs, Internet). As a valued source of reliable information compiled by experts, printed versions found a prominent place in libraries, schools and other educational institutions.

The appearance of digital and open-source versions in the 21st century, such as Wikipedia, has vastly expanded the accessibility, authorship, readership, and variety of encyclopedia entries.[10]

Etymology

Indeed, the purpose of an encyclopedia is to collect knowledge disseminated around the globe; to set forth its general system to the men with whom we live, and transmit it to those who will come after us, so that the work of preceding centuries will not become useless to the centuries to come; and so that our offspring, becoming better instructed, will at the same time become more virtuous and happy, and that we should not die without having rendered a service to the human race in the future years to come.

Diderot[11]

The word

Quintillian in 1470.[16] The copyists took this phrase to be a single Greek word, enkyklopaedia, with the same meaning, and this spurious Greek word became the Neo-Latin word encyclopaedia, which in turn came into English. Because of this compounded word, fifteenth-century readers and since have often, and incorrectly, thought that the Roman authors Quintillian and Pliny described an ancient genre.[17]

Characteristics

The modern encyclopedia was developed from the

term
, and how the term relates to a broader field of knowledge.

To address those needs, an encyclopedia article is typically not limited to simple definitions, and is not limited to defining an individual word, but provides a more extensive meaning for a subject or

discipline. In addition to defining and listing synonymous terms for the topic, the article is able to treat the topic's more extensive meaning in more depth and convey the most relevant accumulated knowledge on that subject. An encyclopedia article also often includes many maps and illustrations, as well as bibliography and statistics.[5]
An encyclopedia is, theoretically, not written in order to convince, although one of its goals is indeed to convince its reader of its own veracity.

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has said that the goal of an encyclopedia should be to provide "the sum of all human knowledge, but sum meaning summary."[18]

Four major elements

There are four major elements that define an encyclopedia: its subject matter, its scope, its method of organization, and its method of production:

  1. Encyclopedias can be general, containing articles on topics in every field (the English-language Encyclopædia Britannica and German Brockhaus are well-known examples).[2] General encyclopedias may contain guides on how to do a variety of things, as well as embedded dictionaries and gazetteers.[citation needed] There are also encyclopedias that cover a wide variety of topics from a particular cultural, ethnic, or national perspective, such as the Great Soviet Encyclopedia or Encyclopaedia Judaica.
  2. Works of encyclopedic scope aim to convey the important accumulated knowledge for their subject domain, such as an encyclopedia of medicine, philosophy or law. Works vary in the breadth of material and the depth of discussion, depending on the target audience.
  3. Some systematic method of organization is essential to making an encyclopedia usable for reference. There have historically been two main methods of organizing printed encyclopedias: the
    cross reference. The epigraph from Horace
    on the title page of the 18th century Encyclopédie suggests the importance of the structure of an encyclopedia: "What grace may be added to commonplace matters by the power of order and connection."
  4. As modern multimedia and the information age have evolved, new methods have emerged for the collection, verification, summation, and presentation of information of all kinds. Projects such as Everything2, Encarta, h2g2, and Wikipedia are examples of new forms of the encyclopedia as information retrieval becomes simpler. The method of production for an encyclopedia historically has been supported in both for-profit and non-profit contexts, such was the case of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia mentioned above which was entirely state sponsored, while the Britannica was supported as a for-profit institution.

Encyclopedic dictionaries

Some works entitled "dictionaries" are actually similar to encyclopedias, especially those concerned with a particular field (such as the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, and Black's Law Dictionary). The Macquarie Dictionary, Australia's national dictionary, became an encyclopedic dictionary after its first edition in recognition of the use of proper nouns in common communication, and the words derived from such proper nouns.

Differences between encyclopedias and dictionaries

There are some broad differences between encyclopedias and dictionaries. Most noticeably, encyclopedia articles are longer, fuller and more thorough than entries in most general-purpose dictionaries.[3][19] There are differences in content as well. Generally speaking, dictionaries provide linguistic information about words themselves, while encyclopedias focus more on the things for which those words stand.[6][7][8][9] Thus, while dictionary entries are inextricably fixed to the word described, encyclopedia articles can be given a different entry name. As such, dictionary entries are not fully translatable into other languages, but encyclopedia articles can be.[6]

In practice, however, the distinction is not concrete, as there is no clear-cut difference between factual, "encyclopedic" information and linguistic information such as appears in dictionaries.[8][19][20] Thus encyclopedias may contain material that is also found in dictionaries, and vice versa.[20] In particular, dictionary entries often contain factual information about the thing named by the word.[19][20]

Pre-modern encyclopedias

Naturalis Historiæ, 1669 edition, title page
Main article: History of encyclopedias

The earliest encyclopedic work to have survived to modern times is the

Roman engineering
.

Isidore of Seville author of Etymologiae (10th. century Ottonian manuscript)

The Spanish scholar

clothes, food, and tools
.

Another Christian encyclopedia was the Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum of Cassiodorus (543–560) dedicated to the Christian divinity and to the seven liberal arts.[22][5] The encyclopedia of Suda, a massive 10th-century Byzantine encyclopedia, had 30,000 entries, many drawing from ancient sources that have since been lost, and often derived from medieval Christian compilers. The text was arranged alphabetically with some slight deviations from common vowel order and place in the Greek alphabet.[22]

The Yongle Encyclopedia[23]

From India, the

Kannada numerals
. Many philosophies which existed in the Jain classics are eloquently and skillfully interpreted in the work.

The enormous encyclopedic work in China of the

Prime Tortoise of the Record Bureau, amounted to 9.4 million Chinese characters
in 1,000 written volumes.

There were many great encyclopedists throughout Chinese history, including the scientist and statesman

Wang Zhen (active 1290–1333) with his Nong Shu of 1313; and Song Yingxing (1587–1666) with his Tiangong Kaiwu. Song Yingxing was termed the "Diderot of China" by British historian Joseph Needham.[26]

Printed encyclopedias

Before the advent of the printing press, encyclopedic works were all hand copied and thus rarely available, beyond wealthy patrons or monastic men of learning: they were expensive, and usually written for those extending knowledge rather than those using it. During the

seven liberal arts
.

Financial, commercial, legal, and intellectual factors changed the size of encyclopedias. Middle classes had more time to read and encyclopedias helped them to learn more. Publishers wanted to increase their output so some countries like Germany started selling books missing alphabetical sections, to publish faster. Also, publishers could not afford all the resources by themselves, so multiple publishers would come together with their resources to create better encyclopedias. Later, rivalry grew, causing copyright to occur due to weak underdeveloped laws. John Harris is often credited with introducing the now-familiar alphabetic format in 1704 with his English Lexicon Technicum: Or, A Universal English Dictionary of Arts and Sciences: Explaining not only the Terms of Art, but the Arts Themselves – to give its full title. Organized alphabetically, its content does indeed contain explanation not merely of the terms used in the arts and sciences, but of the arts and sciences themselves. Sir Isaac Newton contributed his only published work on chemistry to the second volume of 1710.

Encyclopédie

These paragraphs are an excerpt from Encyclopédie.[edit]

Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (English: Encyclopedia, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts),[27] better known as Encyclopédie, was a general encyclopedia published in France between 1751 and 1772, with later supplements, revised editions, and translations. It had many writers, known as the Encyclopédistes. It was edited by Denis Diderot and, until 1759, co-edited by Jean le Rond d'Alembert.[28]

The Encyclopédie is most famous for representing the thought of the Enlightenment. According to Denis Diderot in the article "Encyclopédie", the Encyclopédies aim was "to change the way people think" and for people (bourgeoisie) to be able to inform themselves and to know things.[29] He and the other contributors advocated for the secularization of learning away from the Jesuits.[30] Diderot wanted to incorporate all of the world's knowledge into the Encyclopédie and hoped that the text could disseminate all this information to the public and future generations.[31] Thus, it is an example of democratization of knowledge.

It was also the first encyclopedia to include contributions from many named contributors, and it was the first general encyclopedia to describe the
mechanical arts. In the first publication, seventeen folio volumes were accompanied by detailed engravings. Later volumes were published without the engravings, in order to better reach a wide audience within Europe.[32][33]

Encyclopædia Britannica

These paragraphs are an excerpt from Encyclopædia Britannica.[edit]

The Encyclopædia Britannica (

encyclopaedia. It has been published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. since 1768, although the company has changed ownership seven times. The encyclopaedia is maintained by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 contributors. The 2010 version of the 15th edition, which spans 32 volumes[34] and 32,640 pages, was the last printed edition. Since 2016, it has been published exclusively as an online encyclopaedia
.

Printed for 244 years, the Britannica was the longest-running in-print encyclopaedia in the English language. It was first published between 1768 and 1771 in the Scottish capital of Edinburgh, as three volumes. The encyclopaedia grew in size: the second edition was 10 volumes,[35] and by its fourth edition (1801–1810) it had expanded to 20 volumes.[36] Its rising stature as a scholarly work helped recruit eminent contributors, and the 9th (1875–1889) and 11th editions (1911) are landmark encyclopaedias for scholarship and literary style. Starting with the 11th edition and following its acquisition by an American firm, the Britannica shortened and simplified articles to broaden its appeal to the North American market. In 1933, the Britannica became the first encyclopaedia to adopt "continuous revision", in which the encyclopaedia is continually reprinted, with every article updated on a schedule.[citation needed] In the 21st century, the Britannica has suffered due to competition with the online crowdsourced encyclopedia Wikipedia,[37][38][39] although the Britannica was previously suffering from competition with the digital multimedia encyclopedia Microsoft Encarta.[40] In March 2012, it announced it would no longer publish printed editions and would focus instead on the online version.[41][38] Britannica has been assessed to be politically closer to the centre of the US political spectrum than Wikipedia.[42]

The 15th edition has a three-part structure: a 12-volume
hierarchical outline of knowledge. The Micropædia was meant for quick fact-checking and as a guide to the Macropædia; readers are advised to study the Propædia outline to understand a subject's context and to find more detailed articles. Over 70 years, the size of the Britannica has remained steady, with about 40 million words on half a million topics.[citation needed] Though published in the United States since 1901, the Britannica has for the most part maintained British English spelling
.

Brockhaus Enzyklopädie

These paragraphs are an excerpt from Brockhaus Enzyklopädie.[edit]

The Brockhaus Enzyklopädie (German for Brockhaus Encyclopedia) is a German-language encyclopedia which until 2009 was published by the F. A. Brockhaus printing house.

The first edition originated in the Conversations-Lexikon published by Löbel and Franke in Leipzig 1796–1808. Renamed Der Große Brockhaus in 1928 and Brockhaus Enzyklopädie from 1966, the current 21st thirty-volume edition contains about 300,000 entries on about 24,000 pages, with about 40,000 maps, graphics and tables. It is the largest German-language printed encyclopedia in the 21st century.

In February 2008, F. A. Brockhaus announced the changeover to an
Arvato services, a subsidiary of the Bertelsmann
media group. After more than 200 years, the distribution of the Brockhaus encyclopedia ceased completely in 2014.

Encyclopedias in the US

In the United States, the 1950s and 1960s saw the introduction of several large popular encyclopedias, often sold on installment plans. The best known of these were

door to door.[21] Jack Lynch says in his book You Could Look It Up that encyclopedia salespeople were so common that they became the butt of jokes. He describes their sales pitch saying, "They were selling not books but a lifestyle, a future, a promise of social mobility." A 1961 World Book ad said, "You are holding your family's future in your hands right now," while showing a feminine hand holding an order form.[43] As of the 1990s, two of the most prominent encyclopedias published in the United States were Collier's Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia Americana.[44]

Digital encyclopedias

Physical media

By the late 20th century, encyclopedias were being published on

internet encyclopedias became dominant and replaced disc-based software encyclopedias.[5]

CD-ROM encyclopedias were usually a macOS or Microsoft Windows (3.0, 3.1 or 95/98) application on a CD-ROM disc. The user would execute the encyclopedia's software program to see a menu that allowed them to start browsing the encyclopedia's articles, and most encyclopedias also supported a way to search the contents of the encyclopedia. The article text was usually hyperlinked and also included photographs, audio clips (for example in articles about historical speeches or musical instruments), and video clips. In the CD-ROM age the video clips had usually a low resolution, often 160x120 or 320x240 pixels. Such encyclopedias which made use of photos, audio and video were also called multimedia encyclopedias. However, because of the online encyclopedia, CD-ROM encyclopedias have been declared obsolete.[by whom?]

Microsoft's Encarta, launched in 1993, was a landmark example as it had no printed equivalent. Articles were supplemented with video and audio files as well as numerous high-quality images. After sixteen years, Microsoft discontinued the Encarta line of products in 2009.[45] Other examples of CD-ROM encyclopedia are Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia and Britannica.

Digital encyclopedias enable "Encyclopedia Services" (such as Wikimedia Enterprise) to facilitate programatic access to the content.[46]

Online

This section is an excerpt from Online encyclopedia.[edit]
Online encyclopedias, also called Internet encyclopedias, are digital encyclopedias accessible through the Internet. Examples include Wikipedia, the Encyclopædia Britannica since 2016, and Encyclopedia.com.

Free encyclopedias

"Free encyclopedia" redirects here. For the website that uses the term as its motto, see Wikipedia.
List of other free encyclopedias, from Enciclopedia Libre.

The concept of a free encyclopedia began with the

GNU operating system, would be a "generic" resource. The concept was very similar to Interpedia, but more in line with Stallman's GNU
philosophy.

It was not until Nupedia and later Wikipedia that a stable free encyclopedia project was able to be established on the Internet.

The English Wikipedia, which was started in 2001, became the world's largest encyclopedia in 2004 at the 300,000 article stage.[47] By late 2005, Wikipedia had produced over two million articles in more than 80 languages with content licensed under the copyleft GNU Free Documentation License. As of August 2009, Wikipedia had over 3 million articles in English and well over 10 million combined articles in over 250 languages. Today, Wikipedia has 6,719,565 articles in English, over 60 million combined articles in over 300 languages, and over 250 million combined pages including project and discussion pages.[48]

Since 2002, other free encyclopedias appeared, including

Hudong (2005–) and Baidu Baike (2006–) in Chinese, and Google's Knol (2008–2012) in English. Some MediaWiki-based encyclopedias have appeared, usually under a license compatible with Wikipedia, including Enciclopedia Libre (2002–2021) in Spanish and Conservapedia (2006–), Scholarpedia (2006–), and Citizendium (2007–) in English, the latter of which had become inactive by 2014.[49]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ "Encyclopedia". Archived from the original on August 3, 2007. Glossary of Library Terms. Riverside City College, Digital Library/Learning Resource Center. Retrieved on: November 17, 2007.
  2. ^ a b "What are Reference Resources?". Eastern Illinois University. Archived from the original on November 22, 2022. Retrieved December 17, 2022.
  3. ^
    ISBN 978-0-415-14143-7. Archived from the original
    on January 14, 2021. Retrieved July 27, 2010.
  4. ^ a b "Encyclopedia". Merriam-Webster. Archived from the original on September 29, 2022. Retrieved December 17, 2022.
  5. ^ a b c d e f g h Bocco, Diana (August 30, 2022). "What is an Encyclopedia?". Language Humanities. Archived from the original on September 27, 2022. Retrieved January 24, 2023.
  6. ^
    ISBN 0-19-829951-6
  7. ^ a b "Encyclopaedia". Encyclopædia Britannica. Archived from the original on December 16, 2010. Retrieved July 27, 2010. An English lexicographer, H.W. Fowler, wrote in the preface to the first edition (1911) of The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English language that a dictionary is concerned with the uses of words and phrases and with giving information about the things for which they stand only so far as current use of the words depends upon knowledge of those things. The emphasis in an encyclopedia is much more on the nature of the things for which the words and phrases stand.
  8. ^
    ISBN 978-0-415-14143-7. Archived from the original
    on January 14, 2021. Retrieved July 27, 2010. In contrast with linguistic information, encyclopedia material is more concerned with the description of objective realities than the words or phrases that refer to them. In practice, however, there is no hard and fast boundary between factual and lexical knowledge.
  9. ^
    ISBN 978-0-415-14143-7. Archived from the original
    on April 15, 2021. Retrieved August 17, 2010. An 'encyclopedia' (encyclopaedia) usually gives more information than a dictionary; it explains not only the words but also the things and concepts referred to by the words.
  10. ISBN 978-0-415-78265-4
    .
  11. ^ Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert Encyclopédie. Archived April 29, 2011, at the Wayback Machine University of Michigan Library:Scholarly Publishing Office and DLXS. Retrieved on: November 17, 2007
  12. ^ Ἐγκύκλιος παιδεία Archived February 9, 2021, at the Wayback Machine, Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 1.10.1, at Perseus Project
  13. ^ ἐγκύκλιος Archived March 8, 2021, at the Wayback Machine, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon, at Perseus Project
  14. ^ παιδεία Archived March 8, 2021, at the Wayback Machine, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon, at Perseus Project
  15. ^ According to some accounts, such as the American Heritage Dictionary Archived August 19, 2017, at the Wayback Machine, copyists of Latin manuscripts took this phrase to be a single Greek word, ἐγκυκλοπαιδεία enkyklopaedia.
  16. ISBN 9780226260709
    .
  17. ISBN 978-1-107-03823-3
    .
  18. ^ Fridman, Lex (June 18, 2023). "Transcript for Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia | Lex Fridman Podcast #385". Lex Fridman. Retrieved June 18, 2023.
  19. ^
    ISBN 978-0-415-14143-7. Archived
    from the original on January 14, 2021. Retrieved July 27, 2010. Usually these two aspects overlap – encyclopedic information being difficult to distinguish from linguistic information – and dictionaries attempt to capture both in the explanation of a meaning ...
  20. ^
    ISBN 978-0-19-829951-6
    . The two types, as we have seen, are not easily differentiated; encyclopedias contain information that is also to be found in dictionaries, and vice versa.
  21. ^ a b Grossman, Ron (December 7, 2017). "Long before Google, there was the encyclopedia". Chicago Tribune. Archived from the original on October 22, 2022. Retrieved December 9, 2022.
  22. ^ a b c d "History of Encyclopaedias". Britannica. Archived from the original on October 6, 2022. Retrieved December 9, 2022.
  23. ^ a b c Nobel, Justin (December 9, 2015). "Encyclopedias Are Time Capsules". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on December 5, 2022. Retrieved December 17, 2022.
  24. ^ MacFarlane 1980:4; MacFarlane translates Etymologiae viii.
  25. ^ Braulio, Elogium of Isidore appended to Isidore's De viris illustribus, heavily indebted itself to Jerome.
  26. ^ Needham, Volume 5, Part 7, 102.
  27. ^ Ian Buchanan, A Dictionary of Critical Theory, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 151.
  28. ^ "Encyclopédie | French reference work". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved March 15, 2020.
  29. ^ Denis Diderot as quoted in Hunt, p. 611
  30. ^ University of the State of New York (1893). Annual Report of the Regents, Volume 106. p. 266.
  31. ^ Denis Diderot as quoted in Kramnick, p. 17.
  32. ^ Lyons, M. (2013). Books: a living history. London: Thames & Hudson.
  33. ^ Robert Audi, Diderot, Denis" entry in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, (Cambridge University Press, 2015)
  34. ^ Bosman, Julie (March 13, 2012). "After 244 Years, Encyclopædia Britannica Stops the Presses". The New York Times. Archived from the original on March 14, 2012. Retrieved March 13, 2012.
  35. ^ "History of Encyclopædia Britannica and Britannica Online". Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Archived from the original on October 20, 2006. Retrieved May 31, 2019.
  36. ^ "History of Encyclopædia Britannica and Britannica.com". Britannica.com. Archived from the original on June 9, 2001. Retrieved May 31, 2019.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  37. ^ Cooke, Richard (February 17, 2020). "Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet". Wired. Retrieved March 30, 2021.
  38. ^ a b Bosman, Julie (March 13, 2012). "After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses". The New York Times. Retrieved June 7, 2023.
  39. ^ McArdle, Megan (March 15, 2012). "Encyclopaedia Britannica Goes Out of Print, Won't Be Missed". The Atlantic. Retrieved June 7, 2023.
  40. ISSN 1059-1028
    . Retrieved July 15, 2023.
  41. ^ Kearney, Christine (March 14, 2012). "Encyclopaedia Britannica: After 244 years in print, only digital copies sold". The Christian Science Monitor. Reuters. Archived from the original on May 31, 2019. Retrieved May 31, 2019.
  42. ^ Knowledge, HBS Working. "Wikipedia Or Encyclopædia Britannica: Which Has More Bias?". Forbes. Retrieved July 25, 2023.
  43. ^ Onion, Rebecca (June 3, 2016). "How Two Artists Turn Old Encyclopedias Into Beautiful, Melancholy Art". Slate. Archived from the original on September 23, 2019. Retrieved September 23, 2019.
  44. ISBN 0-89774-744-5
    .
  45. ^ Important Notice: MSN Encarta to be Discontinued. MSN Encarta. Archived from the original on October 27, 2009.
  46. ^ "Encyclopedia Service Are About To Become A Huge Market". www.stillwatercurrent.com. Archived from the original on September 27, 2021. Retrieved September 27, 2021.
  47. ^ "Wikipedia Passes 300,000 Articles making it the worlds largest encyclopedia" Archived September 27, 2007, at the Wayback Machine, Linux Reviews, 2004 Julich y 7.
  48. ^ "List of Wikipedias - Meta". meta.wikimedia.org. Retrieved August 20, 2023.
  49. ISBN 978-0-7864-7356-4
    .

References

External links

Look up encyclopedia, encyclopaedia, or encyclopedic in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Encyclopedias.
Wikisource has original works on the topic: Encyclopedias
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