Websightings: Encyclopedias Online

James Marten

Encyclopedias are a time-tested resource, but despite their rather staid reputations, encyclopedias actually often reflect quite contemporary concerns. Those boomers among us may recall junior high term papers drawn from the World Book Encyclopedia (my family's set was purchased from a traveling salesman going door-to-door in my tiny South Dakota hometown). But the current spate of encyclopedia publishing (in print and on-line) shows that encyclopedias may be evolving beyond the blandly factual entries in the old World Books that still line a section of my parents' bookshelves. This issue's "Websightings" offer glimpses at three on-line encyclopedias. All are free and none requires users to register.

The most traditional of the "webpedias"—to coin a phrase—is the Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed. (http://www.bartleby.com/65/), originally published in 2001 by Columbia University Press and brought to the web by Bartleby.com, an on-line bookseller (the site is also cluttered with ads for Amazon.com, a travel agency, and AT & T). Its entries are also borrowed by on-line sources of information as Yahoo, Infoplease, and Fact Monster. All 6.5 million words of the ten-pound, one-volume print version of the encyclopedia have been loaded onto the site, which features full text and entry word searches and a browsable alphabetic index of all 51,000 entries. Entries on kindergarten, UNICEF, and Florence Kelley are quite brief (one or two paragraphs) and, like most entries, include a link or to other related subjects and a very short list of sources. They keep to facts and dates and, all in all, are pretty clinical. There is no separate entry on the Children's Bureau, although a search for that term finds links to articles on Grace Abbott, Lillian Wald, and Julia Lathrop. The entry on child labor is longer than the other entries sampled for this article—about four paragraphs—but spends as much time on current issues and laws related to the problem as to the history of child labor. Indeed, the strength of the Columbia Encyclopedia is its attempts to be up-to-date and its inclusiveness; most topics and personalities of interest to historians of children and youth have, it seems, received at least a paragraph.

The Columbia Encyclopedia is simply a digital version of a standard reference work. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page), on the other hand, comes straight out of the internet frontier. The site is colorful, user-friendly, and, because it's sponsored by Wikimedia Foundation Inc., a non-profit organization whose goal is to provide "free knowledge to every person in the world" (users can access the site in more than a dozen languages), it is not clogged with ads. It's easy to make fun of on-line communities like Wikipedia. The newspaper parody The Onion (http://theonion.com) recently featured a "column" by an avid contributor complaining that Wikipedia's articles on "Weird Al" Yankovich, novelizations of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," and cartoonist Marc Hansen (creator of the cult-comic "Ralph Snart") failed to give these pop-culture icons their just due. For instance, at 850 words, the essay on Yankovich "fails to account for the grand impact and scope of his career."

Wikipedia may be easy to parody, but it is thoroughly democratic (users can access the site in more than a dozen languages) and a tribute to amateur scholarship. The entries are always in flux; they are constantly being revised (users can track the revisions if they wish). The "Community Portal" section issues calls for writers and collaborators on specific articles ("the partition of India" was featured one week late in 2004) and advertises meetings of Wikipedia members (although you don't have to be a registered member to post entries, you need to register to help make decisions about future articles and participate in on-line surveys).

And, somewhat surprisingly, the entries are quite useful. The entry on kindergarten was several paragraphs long and featured a bibliography of more than a dozen books and a number of links to websites. UNICEF warranted a shorter piece—although anyone who thinks it deserves more should log-on and have at it—and Child Labor, while focusing more on the current situation than on history, provides a very nice introduction without a lot of dates and names and a number of links to cross-listed topics and on-line sources. (Note: the revisions log lists nearly fifty major and minor additions and deletions to this article.) No entries for the Children's Bureau or Florence Kelley appeared.

Like the Columbia Encyclopedia, Wikipedia is more concerned with the present than the past. However, many of the latter's entries feature illustrations—some in color—and the tone of most articles is friendlier and less detached. The results of a search for one other term revealed a major difference between the sources (and, admittedly, showed why Wikipedia makes a likely target for parody). Not surprisingly, the Columbia Encyclopedia has no entry on Pokémon, the video-game/collector card/television program phenomena popular among six-to-eleven-year-old boys, although there is a reference to an article on anime, the distinctive Japanese-style animation in which the Pokémon characters are drawn. But Wikipedia has ten pages and a dozen illustrations on the topic!

The third and final on-line encyclopedia reviewed in this issue is the LoveToKnow Free Online Encyclopedia (http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/), which is actually a selection of thousands of articles from the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, originally published in 1911. The site is fully searchable, with a detailed, alphabetical topic index. Although it contains only a fraction of the 40,000 articles spread over twenty-nine volumes of the original, there are, nonetheless, a number of essays of interest to historians of children and youth. Because of the publication date and the extensive (although certainly not exclusive) attention paid to Great Britain, UNICEF, the Children's Bureau, and Florence Kelley do not appear. A search for child labor turns up no one article, but links to many entries that mention child labor, ranging from Agricultural Gangs to Oklahoma and from the Labour Church to Howard Crosby. Another link takes users to a long article called "Law for Children," which relates the evolution in the US and Great Britain of laws related to the health and work of children and youth. I stumbled across another very useful article on children's games, which provided anthropological information on age-old games played by children in the England, especially. The one shortcoming of the site is the many typos and missing passages that have resulted from too-speedy transcribing and scanning.

Encyclopedias are by their nature limited tools for scholarly research. And in an age when millions of pages of information are available at the click of a mouse, such broad approaches to the study of knowledge—unlike the specialized encyclopedia discussed elsewhere in the newsletter—may be a bit archaic. But there is still a place for two of these three encyclopedia: the conservative old war horse the Encyclopedia Britannica and the new age Wikipedia. "Information can be made memorable," the editors at LoveToKnow quote from Sir Kenneth Clark, "only when it is slightly colored by prejudice"—or, perhaps more accurate in the case of these sources, the passion of their authors for their subjects.