The University of Michigan's collaborative translation of Diderot and d'Alembert's Encylopédie has completed some 650 selections from the Enlightenment keystone, including articles on California, vanilla, werewolves, the English language, beauty, and the complete structure of human knowledge. [more inside]
posted by Iridic on Sep 1, 2009 - 7 comments

"What we are seeing in this project is that all of Europe was a camp." The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum just released the first volume of a projected seven-volume Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945. "They assumed the finished work would be massive, featuring a staggering 5,000 to 7,000 camps and ghettos. They underestimated by 15,000." [more inside]
posted by kirkaracha on Jun 3, 2009 - 23 comments

Ever wondered what comes next, and why? The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences has the answers. (Previously.)
posted by parudox on Mar 10, 2009 - 33 comments

Whether you're a casual cultivator or gardening guru, PlantCare.com has a wealth of information about the care and feeding of indoor and outdoor plants. You can search the extensive plant database to find information on thousands of house plants, participate in and discuss your favorite gardening topics in the plant forum, and expand your plant knowledge with hundreds of gardening tips and guides.
posted by netbros on Feb 25, 2009 - 10 comments

World of Science contains budding encyclopedias of astronomy, scientific biography, chemistry, and physics. This resource has been assembled over more than a decade by internet encyclopedist Eric Weisstein with assistance from the internet community. MeFi visited Weisstein's Mathworld a couple years ago.
posted by netbros on Feb 18, 2009 - 6 comments

The Visual Telling of Stories
A lyrical encyclopedia of visual propositions;
a visually orientated taxonomy of the ways in which pictures are used to tell stories. [more inside]
posted by carsonb on Feb 18, 2009 - 5 comments

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyonetrusted users can edit. If the MediaWiki FlaggedRevisions extension is enabled, the general public will see changes to articles only after approval by a trusted editor. Wikipedians conducted a poll on whether Wikipedia should enable the feature for a limited trial. Almost 60 percent of voting editors answered in the affirmative. Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales's subsequent request to enable the feature anyway has been opposed by some, claiming that the margin of votes does not meet Wikipedia's consensus standard. While it might help avoid embarrassing incidents of vandalism, the proposed trial could lead to a big change in the Wikipedia way.
posted by grouse on Jan 27, 2009 - 120 comments

Online Encyclopedia of Mathematics Edited by Michiel Hazewinkel (CWI, Amsterdam), and originaly published in dead tree form in 2002, now free to browse and poke into. [more inside]
posted by Iosephus on Aug 2, 2008 - 7 comments

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an excellent resource for matters philosophical. There you can be enlightened on such diverse subjects as paradoxes existential or logical, Greek or American philosophers obscure to the wider world, philosophers whose names have resounded through the ages, both well-attested and possibly mythical, Buddhist thought and Western mysticism and definitions of thorny and difficult concepts. And that's just a small sampling of the letter P section. All articles are written by specialists on the subject and the editors of the IEP are all academic philosophers. The encyclopedia is far from complete, so if you think you can help out, they have a list of their 100 most desired articles.
posted by Kattullus on May 15, 2008 - 31 comments

Theoi Greek Mythology is an internet encyclopedia with over 1500 pages on various characters from classical myth, covering everything from famous gods and goddesses to obscure nymphs, titans and monsters. If the confusing familial relations of the Greek gods vex you, there are 10 different family trees to help you make sense of it all. There's also an extensive library of ancient works concerning classical mythology and a bibliography should you long for more to read. Last but not least, Theoi has a gallery of over 1200 artworks from antiquity, which I have been happily browsing for a good while.
posted by Kattullus on Feb 14, 2008 - 23 comments

Have you noticed quite a number of stupid things lately? Perhaps now you will find them documented in the Encyclopedia of Stupid.
posted by washburn on Oct 2, 2007 - 48 comments

Worried about inaccuracies in Wikipedia? Try Scholarpedia, a peer-reviewed encyclopedia, with articles written by experts in their field. [more inside]
posted by Upton O'Good on Sep 27, 2007 - 26 comments

More than fifty selected articles from The Princeton Companion of Mathematics (username: Guest, password: PCM) — a thematically-organized compendium of mathematics and mathematicians from Fields Medal-winner Tim Gowers. [via, previously]
posted by Blazecock Pileon on Sep 27, 2007 - 8 comments

Berkshire Publishing has made available the full-text of some quality but little known reference works: Berkshire Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction (1-vol), Global Perspectives on the United States (1-vol), Berkshire Encyclopedia of World Sport (4-vol), Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History (5-vol), Berkshire Encyclopedia of Extreme Sports.
posted by stbalbach on Sep 25, 2007 - 10 comments

The Encyclopedia of Life project will create a compendium of every aspect of the biosphere. It aims to compile data on all of Earth's 1.8 million known species on one Web site, and will include species descriptions, pictures, maps, videos, sound, sightings by amateurs, and links to entire genomes and scientific journal papers. E. O. Wilson is getting his wish. [Via BB.]
posted by homunculus on May 9, 2007 - 31 comments

WiserEarth is a user-editable relational database that aspires to list, categorize, and describe every non profit and civil society organization on Earth. It currently includes 104,304 organizations which can be viewed by name, location, or areas of focus. You can perform complex searches. You can post (or search) jobs, events, and resources. You can discuss areas of focus, such as Urban Forestry, Evolutionary Ecology, or government oversight and reform. You can also visualize the networks connecting these areas of focus and the various organizations.
posted by alms on May 9, 2007 - 6 comments

The Toilet Paper Encyclopedia from toiletpaperworld. Filled with fun facts about the history of toilet paper, including the results of various toilet paper surveys (more people chose toilet paper over food as a necessity if stranded on a deserted island), toilet paper stories, statistics about which kinds of toilet paper are most popular worldwide, and zingers (toilet paper jokes and observations). Previously on Metafilter, The Whole World Toilet Paper Museum.
posted by amyms on Mar 22, 2007 - 9 comments

The Thain's Book is an online encyclopedia of Middle-earth in the Third Age. Oh, you're an expert? Take the Middle-earth Challenge and prove it!
posted by owhydididoit on Oct 8, 2006 - 11 comments

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find the article about the flatworm with 230 penises and one vagina referenced (but unfortunately not linked) in this article about the in the amazing Earth, Sea and Sky exhibit which opened today as part of New Zealand's beautiful Te Ara Encyclopedia.
posted by If I Had An Anus on Jun 12, 2006 - 24 comments

Digital Universe , an alternative to Wikipedia, has been launched by wikipedia proposer Larry Sanger. Digital Universe will be powered by ManyOne, a new 3D browser, will include paid experts, a subscription option, and will require real names from contributors. This may or may not be connected to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales' editing his own bio to remove reference to Sanger as co-founder.
posted by MetaMonkey on Dec 20, 2005 - 49 comments

The journal Nature: "Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries."
Nature had experts review articles from both encyclopedias. (Also, 10% of Nature authors contribute to Wikipedia.)
posted by Tlogmer on Dec 14, 2005 - 31 comments

Pliny's Natural History, the first encyclopedia. Featuring chapters like "Other wonderful things related to dolphins" and one mentioning the lynx and the sphinx in a single passage. Obviously he got a lot very wrong, but it launched a tradition of authoritative encyclopedias. More recently, you hopefully know that the forty-four million word eleventh (1911) edition of Encyclopedia Britannica is online, later volumes are not, but you can still find elsewhere Trotsky's article on Lenin, Freud's on psychoanalysis, Houdini on conjuring, or Lawrence of Arabia on guerillas. Britannica also offers a series of articles from its archives showing how views on Mars or the debate in 1768 over whether California was an island. Other fascinating encyclopedias online include the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia and the 1908 Catholic Encyclopedia, and the Encyclopedia Mythica.
posted by blahblahblah on Jul 5, 2005 - 16 comments

The Encyclopedia of Chicago is now online and free, less than a year after being released in book form.
posted by me3dia on May 12, 2005 - 19 comments

Cellphedia is a thesis project created by Limor Garcia (NYU). It's a cell phone application that allows to send and receive encyclopedia-type inquiries through Text messaging. A user will be able to get all the information they need – from “how old is the queen of England?” to “how many miles is the Brooklyn Bridge?” – through a real-time social network, while walking in the street.
posted by stbalbach on May 3, 2005 - 6 comments

Wapedia is Wikipedia for your WAP phone or PDA. Alternatively, why not just download the whole thing and carry it with you?
posted by Mwongozi on Apr 23, 2005 - 13 comments

Encyclopaedia Metallum. From Abortion Grenade to Zombie Holocaust.
posted by gwint on Sep 3, 2004 - 6 comments

The Jewish Encyclopaedia. 'This website contains the complete contents of the 12-volume Jewish Encyclopedia, which was originally published between 1901-1906. The Jewish Encyclopedia, which recently became part of the public domain, contains over 15,000 articles and illustrations.'
posted by plep on Jul 4, 2004 - 9 comments

Simple English Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia with simple words and grammar.
posted by reklaw on Apr 30, 2004 - 4 comments

The Art Millenium "The Encyclopedia was founded in May 1999. It contains more than 15,000 pictures and overviews of about 1000 artists. Total size is 2.5 Gigabytes" I was there in their Collections looking at Graphics (Dore, Beardsley, Cranach, Durer, Giger), specifically all of Max Ernst's Une Semaine de Bonte. I have not begun to scratch the surface.
posted by vacapinta on Apr 20, 2004 - 4 comments

The Insectlopedia has proven to be a fun distraction from human-based work today. Not too many places keep so much info on bugs handy and updated. Mostly a page of links to off-site content, yet it keeps drawing me back for more. Everything from the Social Wasps of Siberia to Live Beecams can be found here.
posted by salsamander on Mar 1, 2004 - 3 comments

The Encyclopedia of Arda A reference guide to Tolkien-can't tell an orc from a Uruk-hai? Stumped at what the three kinds of hobbits are? This website has the answers. Nicely laid out site, too.
posted by konolia on Jan 4, 2004 - 7 comments

The 1911 Encyclopedia, or the LoveToKnow Free Online Encyclopedia, is advertised as "what many consider to be the best encyclopedia ever written. As a research tool, this 1911 encyclopedia edition is unparalleled - even today." But what about the definition for Negro? It reads in part: "A dark skin, varying from dark brown, reddish-brown, or chocolate to nearly black; dark tightly curled hair, flat in transverse section,1 of the 'woolly' or the 'frizzly' type; a greater or less tendency to prognathism; eyes dark brown with yellowish cornea; nose more or less broad and flat; and large teeth." Can an encyclopedia with definitions like these be considered useful at all?
posted by josephtate on Nov 24, 2003 - 40 comments

Prof. George W. Hart, of the Computer Science Department at SUNY Stony Brook, has an enviable web presence. His Encyclopedia of Polyhedra alone is worth the visit, his geometric sculptures make the nerd in me weep at their beauty, and his trilobite recipe looks mighty yummy.
posted by ewagoner on Dec 19, 2002 - 12 comments

Gary Westfahl's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Film is an attempt to do for SF film what David Thomson's brilliant "A Biographical Dictionary of Film" does for film in general - to provide a well informed and wholly subjective survey of the most important people who contributed to the field. The BESFF is very much a work in progress, and half the fun is seeing who author Gary Westfahl has chosen to include this month. His entries so far range from the obvious to the surprising to the deeply obscure. Always though, his witty and often compassionate pocket reviews of these carreers show how seriously he feels SF cinema should be taken, and by extension how betrayed he feels by those within the field who don't.
posted by thatwhichfalls on Dec 2, 2002 - 6 comments

Can you stump the Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences? Every identifiable sequence known to man, including:

Name: Busy Beaver problem: maximal number of steps that an n-state Turing machine can make on an initially blank tape before eventually halting.
Comment: The sequence grows faster than any computable function of n, and so is non-computable.
Keywords: hard,huge,nice,nonn,bref

If your sequence does not appear there, you might want to try the Super Seeker.
posted by vacapinta on Apr 15, 2002 - 9 comments

"The gremlin in Falling Hare (who, let us reiterate, is *not* Wendell Willkie) has an elegant flying helmet/plane tail design and a Benny Rubin-like laugh." The Warner Bros. Cartoon Companion covers the heyday of Merrie Melodies and Loony Toons, with capsule biographies of Warner Brothers animators, explanations for no-longer-obvious cultural references, and brief notes on the characters. No design to speak of, but a wonderful resource for anyone searching for a list of WB cartoons that parody Cab Calloway, arguing about whether Elmer Fudd predates Yosemite Sam, or just wondering what the heck Marvin the Martian's given name was.
posted by snarkout on Aug 29, 2001 - 29 comments

britannica ends free access. You have to pay $5/month for complete entries, etc., now (or $50/year). Knew it would happen, still too bad.
posted by aflakete on Jul 30, 2001 - 15 comments

WhatIs - Definitions for thousands of the most current IT-related words. Not everyone knows about this site. It is pretty helpful for a quick lookup for anything computer related.
posted by sikander on Jul 11, 2001 - 3 comments

Pope Joan's voyage through multiple editions of Encyclopedia Britannica.
posted by grumblebee on Nov 28, 2000 - 1 comment

Encyclopedia Mythica - An encyclopedia on mythology, folklore, and legend.
posted by y0bhgu0d on Jul 22, 2000 - 9 comments

Nupedia is an open source encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to, much in the spirit of DMOZ, the open directory project. It's an attempt to combine the world's experts into one knowledge resource. I guess the question is now...can it work?
posted by mathowie on May 16, 2000 - 3 comments