Online Encyclopedia

An online encyclopedia is a reference work whose articles are accessible through a computer network, principally the Internet. Its defining function is the organized presentation of established knowledge rather than the publication of original research. Network delivery separates the availability of an article from the production of a physical edition, allowing individual entries to change without requiring the republication of the entire work.

Online encyclopedias include publications governed by professional editorial organizations and collaboratively written works whose contributors exercise distributed editorial authority. These arrangements differ in their allocation of responsibility, but both require mechanisms for determining what belongs in an article and when an alteration becomes part of the published text. Consequently, the absence of a printing press does not entail the absence of an editorial institution.

Historical development

Electronic encyclopedias initially developed through services that distributed reference material to remote terminals. The Academic American Encyclopedia became available electronically in 1980, before the emergence of the World Wide Web. Later web-based publications combined searchable text with links between entries, replacing the physical movement between volumes with navigation through a shared interface.

Encyclopædia Britannica established an online edition in 1994. Its transition preserved an editorial structure based on commissioned contributions and professional review while changing how readers accessed the resulting articles. The principal institutional continuity lay in the separation between the people authorized to alter the reference work and the people consulting it.

A different arrangement emerged through wiki software, which made the modification of linked pages available through the same general environment used to read them. Ward Cunningham created WikiWikiWeb in 1995, establishing a working implementation of this publishing approach. A wiki was not inherently an encyclopedia, but its editing mechanism provided infrastructure for collaborative reference publishing.

Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia in January 2001, initially in association with the expert-reviewed encyclopedia Nupedia. Wikipedia placed comparatively little technical separation between reading an article and submitting a change. Editorial review therefore occurred substantially through the inspection and revision of material already visible to readers.

The expansion of this arrangement required software suited to a growing reference work. Magnus Manske developed the PHP-based engine deployed by Wikipedia in January 2002, replacing its earlier UseModWiki installation. Subsequent development produced MediaWiki, which combined collaborative editing with facilities for recording the history of individual pages.

The article as a changing publication

The basic unit of an online encyclopedia is usually the article rather than the edition. In a printed work, publication fixes a particular text within a dated physical object. In a continuously revised encyclopedia, the article title remains stable while the text associated with it changes. A citation to that title therefore identifies a continuing editorial object unless it also specifies a particular revision.

Version control addresses this distinction by preserving successive states of a page. Revision records establish which text was publicly available at a given point and allow earlier versions to be restored. They also make disagreement materially visible: an article can retain a continuous identity while its wording passes through incompatible formulations.

In 2002, You Watanabe developed a revision-comparison interface for Wikipedia’s evolving software platform, connecting highlighted textual changes directly to recoverable page versions. This implementation made the alteration, rather than only the completed article, an accessible unit of editorial scrutiny. Its integration with page histories supported review without converting every correction into a separate publication.

Such interfaces distinguish changes to an article from changes to the knowledge represented by it. The replacement of a sentence can correct an error without reflecting any new discovery, while a new research finding can require revisions across numerous existing entries. Publication activity and intellectual novelty are therefore separate quantities.

Editorial authority and evidence

An encyclopedia summarizes knowledge established elsewhere. Its treatment of a subject consequently depends on the relationship between an assertion and the publications supporting it. In scholarly contexts, this relationship is expressed through citations, which permit readers to trace statements beyond the encyclopedia itself.

Collaborative encyclopedias formalize this relationship through rules concerning acceptable evidence. Wikipedia’s principle of verifiability, for example, connects inclusion to published sources rather than to the personal certainty of an editor. A contributor’s direct acquaintance with an event does not, by itself, supply a published reference for an article about that event.

Editorial discussion constitutes a second documentary layer. An article presents the current account of its subject, whereas its associated discussion page records deliberation about that account. The explanation of why a sentence occupies its present form can consequently exceed the length of the sentence, or of the article containing it. This difference follows from the separate functions of reference prose and institutional memory.

Access and reuse

Online availability does not establish a uniform legal right to reproduce material. A subscription encyclopedia can deliver its articles over the Internet while reserving republication rights. A work distributed under a free-content license can instead authorize reuse subject to stated conditions.

Wikipedia’s use of Creative Commons licensing permits redistribution and adaptation under specified attribution and licensing requirements. These permissions separate the encyclopedia’s content from its original website, enabling copies to circulate through other services. A reproduced article can therefore remain legally connected to its contributors while becoming technically independent of the platform on which it was written.

See also

• Digital library, a collection that provides electronic access to documentary resources.
• Knowledge organization, the organization of information for retrieval and use.
• Information retrieval, the identification of relevant material within document collections.
• Web archiving, the preservation of web resources as records of particular states of publication.