less_retarded_wiki/encyclopedia.md
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Encyclopedia

Encyclopedia (also encyclopaedia, cyclopedia or cyclopaedia, from Greek enkyklios paideia, roughly "general education") is a large book (or a series of books) providing structured summary of wide knowledge in one or many fields of knowledge (such as mathematics, history, engineering, general knowledge etc.), usually structured as a collection of alphabetically ordered articles on terms used in the field. Paper encyclopedias are oftentimes printed in several volumes as the amount of contained information is too great for a single book (in large ones you may even see one or two volumes dedicated ONLY for the index). The largest and most famous encyclopedia to date is the online Wikipedia created by volunteers in free culture spirit, however Wikipedia suffers from significant issues such as censorship, high political propaganda and low quality of writing, therefore it is important to also stay interested in other encyclopedias such as Britannica, Americana or LRS wiki.

Encyclopedias are awesome, get as many of them as you can, especially the printed ones -- they are usually relatively cheap (especially second hand books) and provide an ENORMOUS amount of information, FOREVER (no one can cancel your physically owned paper book, you will retain it even after the collapse when such books will become practically your only source of human knowledge). Also remember, paper books are still of much higher quality than online resources such as Wikipedia -- even if they lose in terms of shear volume, they make up in quality of writing and still many times contain information that's not available online, and the older ones are more objective and trustworthy, considering the decline of free speech online. Shorter articles may also do a better job at providing overall summary of a topic and filtering out less important information, as opposed to a gigantic Wikipedia article. Furthermore even if such a book isn't free as in freedom, the knowledge, information and data contained in it is in the public domain as such things cannot (yet) be owned, therefore it is possible to legally paraphrase the information into a new source which we may make public domain itself (however watch out to not merely copy-paste texts from encyclopedias as text CAN be copyrighted, as well as e.g. the mere selection of which facts to include; always be very careful).

Since an encyclopedia will typically focus on encompassing wide knowledge, as the other side of the coin its disadvantage will also oftentimes be shallowness, it will go into greater depth only on very important topics, although very big encyclopedias largely eliminate this issue and go fairly deep on all subjects; encyclopedias specialized on some particular subject can also afford to provide in-depth knowledge.

{ A favorite pastime of mine is looking up the same term in different encyclopedias and comparing them -- this can help get to the essence of actually understanding the term, as well as revealing censorship and different views of the authors. ~drummyfish }

Great nerds read encyclopedias linearly from start to finish just like a normal book, which may help expand one's knowledge as well as ignite curiosity in new things and spot some cool interesting facts. { And yet bigger nerds write their own encyclopedias. ~drummyfish }

Similar terms: encyclopedias, which also used to be called cyclopedias in the past, are similar to dictionaries and these types of books often overlap (many encyclopedias call themselves dictionaries); the main difference is that a dictionary focuses on providing linguistic information and generally has shorter term definitions, while encyclopedias have longer articles (which however limits their total number, i.e. encyclopedias will usually prefer quality over quantity). Encyclopedias are also a subset of so called reference works, i.e. works that serve to provide information and reference to it (other kinds of reference works being e.g. world maps, tabulated values or API references). A universal/general encyclopedia is one that focuses on human knowledge at wide, as opposed to an encyclopedia that focuses on one specific field of knowledge. Compendium can be seen almost as a synonym to encyclopedia, with encyclopedias perhaps usually being more general and extensive. Almanac is also similar to encyclopedia, more focusing on tabular data. Micropedia is another term, sometimes used to denote a smaller encyclopedia (one edition of Britannica came with a micropedia as well as a larger macropedia).

These are some nice/interesting/benchmark articles to look up in encyclopedias: algorithm, anarchism, Andromeda (galaxy), Antarctica, Atlantis, atom, axiom of choice, Bible, big bang, black hole, brain, Buddhism, C (programming language), cannibalism, capitalism, castle, cat, censorship, central processing unit, chess, Chicxulub, China, color, comet, communism, computer, Creative Commons, Deep Blue, democracy, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, depression, determinism, dinosaur, dodo, dog, Doom (game), Earth, Einstein, Elo, Encyclopedia, entropy, ethics, Euler's Number, evolution, font, football, fractal, free software, game, gigantopythecus, go (game), god, GNU project, hacker, Hanging Gardens of Babylon, hardware, Hitler, Holocaust, homosexual, human, infinity, information, intelligence, Internet, IQ, Japan, Jesus, Jew, language, Latin, life, light, lightning, Linux, logarithm, logic, love, Mammoth, mathematics, Mariana Trench, Mars, Milky Way, Moon, morality, Mount Everest, music, necrophilia, number, Open Source, negro, nigger, pacifism, pedophilia, penis, pi, Pluto, prime number, quaternion, Pompei, Quran, race, Roman Empire, sex, sine, schizophrenia, software, Stallman (Richard), star, Stonehenge, suicide, Sun, Tibet, technology, Tetris, time, Titanic, transistor, Troy, Tyrannousaurus Rex, UFO, universe, Unix, Uruk, Usenet, Valonia Ventricosa (bubble algae), Vatican, Venus, video game, Wikipedia, woman, World War II, World Wide Web, ...

What is the best letter in an encyclopedia? If you are super nerdy, you may start to search for your favorite starting letter -- this if fun and may also help you e.g. decide which volume of your encyclopedia to take with you when traveling. Which letter is best depends on many things, e.g. the language of the encyclopedia, its size, your area of interest and so on. Assuming English and topics that would be interesting to the readers of LRS wiki, the best letter is most likely C -- it is the second most common starting letter in dictionaries, has a great span and includes essential and interesting terms such as computer, C programming language, cat, communism, capitalism, chess, christianity, collapse, CPU, color, culture, copyleft, compiler, creative commons, cryptography, copyright, car, cancer, cellular automata, consumerism, cosine, Chomsky, CIA, cybernetics, cracking, chaos, carbon, curvature, chemistry, censorship and others. As close second comes S, the most frequent letter in dictionaries, with terms such as Stallman, science, shader, semiconductor, silicon, software, sound, socialism, state, selflessness, speech recognition, steganography, square root, sudoku, suicide, speedrun, space, star, Sun, sine, Soviet union, schizophrenia, set, suckless, shit, sex and others. { This is based on a list I made where I assigned points to each letter. The letters that follow after C and S are P, M, A, E, T, L, R, F, D, G, I, B, H, U, N, W, V, J, O, K, Q, Z, Y, X. ~drummyfish }

Notable/Nice Encyclopedias

Here is a list of notable encyclopedias, focused on general knowledge English language ones. The most notable ones are in bold. Please do check also encyclopedias in other languages that you speak (or which you can easily autotranslate), we can't list those here but there are many large and awesome ones, for example the Russian Lurkmore/neolurk/etc. (e.g. https://neolurk.org).

{ See also https://wikiindex.org/. ~drummyfish }

name year legal status format ~articles comment
Britannica 9th edition 1889 PD (old) 25 vol. legendary enc., major edition, one of "Big Three", partly digitized (archive.org, wikisource, ...)
Britannica 11th edition 1910 PD (old) 29 vol. 40K legendary enc., major edition, one of "Big Three", mostly digitized (both scan and txt), PC incorrect :)
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia 2002 proprietary 1 vol. 2000p 28K nice, short descriptions, condensed from the main multivol. Brit., piratable pdf
Britannica online ...now proprietary online 130K bloated, high quality articles, unpaid is limited and with ads
Citizendium 2006... proprietary? (NC) online 18K Wikipedia alternative, high censorship, faggots have unclear license
Chambers Encyclopedia (new) 2001 proprietary 1 vol. 980p 1 vol republication of old multivol. enc. (going back to 1800s, already PD), topic-sorted
Collier's New Encyclopedia 1921 PD (old) 10 vol. NOT TO BE CONFUSED with Collier's Encyclopedia (different one), digitized on Wikisource (txt)
Columbia Encyclopedia 1935... proprietary 1 vol. ~3Kp ~50K high quality, lots of information { Read the 1993 edition, it's super nice. ~drummyfish }
Conservaped. 2006... proprietary online 52K American fascist wiki, has basic factual errors
Larousse Desk Reference Enc. 1995 proprietary 1 vol. 800p 200K? by James Hughes, nice, quality general overviews, topic-ordered { I bought this, it's nice. ~drummyfish }
Domestic Encyclopaedia 1802 PD (old) 4 vol. shorter articles, partially digitized on Wikisource
Encyclopedia Americana 1820... PD (old) ~30 vol. longer articles, one of "Big Three", several editions (1906, 1920) partly digitized on wikisource
Encyclopedia Dramatica 2004... PD (CC0) online 15K informal/fun/"offensive" but valuable info (on society, tech, ...), basically no censorship, no propaganda
Encyclopedia of Marxism 1999... CC BY-SA online ~3K focused on Marxism, quality, shorter articles
Everybodywiki 2017... CC BY-SA online ~300K alternative to Wikipedia allowing articles on non notable things and people
Google Knol ~2010 proprietary online failed online enc. by Google, archived on archive.org
Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia 2003 proprietary CD
GNU CIDE 2012... GPL online/elec. ~123K GNU English dictionary, forked from old Webster's dictionary
Illustrated Family Encyclopedia 1997 proprietary 2 vol. 920p 5K kid-friendly, nice pictures, USA bias, piratable
Infogalactic 2016... CC BY-SA online 2M Wikipedia fork, no SJW censorship, FOR PROFIT (you can buy article control lol), can't make accounts
Leftypedia 2020... GFDL online ~200 Leftist encyclopedia, currently NOT littered by SJWs, writing about all branches of the "left"
LRS wiki 2021... PD (CC0) online/elec. 500 best encyclopedia, focused on tech/society, no censorship
Metapedia 2006... GFDL online 7K Wikipedia fork, online, no SJW censorship, ATM limited account creation, "pro-European" fascism
Microsoft Encarta ...2009 proprietary electronic 62K Micro$oft enc., low quality articles (errors), MS propaganda (no free software etc. lol), is on archive.org
New World Encyclopedia 2005... CC BY-SA online ~15K made by some church, quite nice articles (often heavily rewritten from Wikipedia)
ProleWiki 2020... proprietary online ~3K Proletariat wiki, similar to Leftypedia but focused on Marxism-Leninism.
Simple English Wikipedia 2001... CC BY-SA online 200K Wikipedia with simpler language and simpler explanations, censored
The New American Cyclopaedia 1879 PD (old) 16 vol. partially digitized on Wikisource (txt)
The New International Encyc. 1905 PD (old) 20 vol. partially digitized on Wikisource
The Nuttall Encyclopaedia 1907 PD (old) 1 vol. 16K short articles, oldschool, digitized (gutenberg)
Vikidia 2006... CC BY-SA online 4K "Wikipedia for kids", probably as censored as Wikipedia
Webster's Unabridged Dictionary 1864 PD (old) paper 476K short descriptions, digitized (gutenberg)
Wikidata 2012... PD (CC0) online/elec. 109M database, Wikipedia sister project
Wikipedia 2001... CC BY-SA online 6M largest and most famous, EXTREME PSEUDOLEFTIST CENSORSHIP AND POLITICAL PROPAGANDA, free culture
Wiktionary 2002... CC BY-SA online 1M dictionary, Wikipedia's sister project, many language versions
Old Wikipedia 2001 GFDL online 19K archived old Wikipedia, less censorship, https://nostalgia.wikipedia.org
Pears' Cyclopedia 1897 PD (old) 1 vol. 740p contains dictionary, general knowl. maps, reference etc., scanned on archive.org
World Almanac and Book of Facts 1868... some PD (old) 1 vol. interesting and useful information, data and facts from old to new age, US-centered
The World Book 1917... proprietary 22 vol. 17K best selling print enc., large, high quality but for younger audience, US propaganda (anticommunism etc.)
The World Book 1917 1917 PD (old) 8 vol. 3K nicely readable
Uncyclopedia 2005... proprietary (NC) online 37K parody, fun enc., "more normie friendly dramatica"

See Also