• Recommend:
• 0 Comments

Assessing Online Encyclopedias

The Funk and Wagnalls site is a student's dream come true; others are useful, too.

By Glenn McDonald, PCWorld   

When CD-ROM reference titles hit their stride a few years back, I remember thinking how much easier and more productive homework--and research in general--suddenly had become. (Why, when I was a kid, we had to walk to the library, barefoot, uphill, you know the drill ...) Now that in-depth reference services have migrated to the Web, you have access to entire libraries of reference materials for the price of your monthly Internet access.

While students are the obvious (and targeted) beneficiaries of these new online services, anyone needing quick research tools will find the evolving breed of online encyclopedias valuable.

Funk and Wagnalls Shines

The only online service I've seen that gives you free access to the unabridged content of its print encyclopedia content, Funk and Wagnalls Web site is an embarrassment of riches for the student or casual researcher.

The main interface lets you run your query through the unabridged encyclopedia, Webster's College Dictionary, a database of Reuters news articles, or the Web at large (through Yahoo). Within the encyclopedia interface, you can search by key word, browse topics alphabetically, or filter by media type. Your searches can include animations, photos, audio, or maps.

Returned articles are full-length, indexed, and cross-referenced. For example, the main entry on "Scotland" features 6500 words, outlined at the top by subtopic (such as Land and Resources, or Education and Culture) and even includes embedded images such as charts, maps, and flags.

The Funk and Wagnalls site also takes advantage of the online medium by providing about 50 interactive, narrated animations, which use Macromedia's Flash technology and RealAudio's streaming audio system. You need plug-ins to run either of them. The animations worked well, but were often too choppy on my 56-kilobit-per-second dial-up connection.

The Web site requires you to register for a free membership, but outlines its privacy policy up front. Funk and Wagnalls promises your e-mail address will not be disclosed to other parties. The site has no banner ads, either, which makes me wonder how it makes money. But I'm not complaining.

Pay Here for More Info

Microsoft's Encarta encyclopedia series has been deservedly popular on CD-ROM for many years, and its free online service--Encarta Concise--is a successful translation to the Web. Article entries are significantly abridged--the Scotland entry clocked in at 1200 words. But, like Funk and Wagnalls, Encarta Concise offers maps and photos.

Encarta Concise is extremely well designed and I found it moved much faster over my dial-up connection than any of the other sites I visited. While it works well as a stand-alone reference service, Encarta Concise is also designed to encourage subscription to the Encarta Deluxe premium online. Encarta Deluxe offers unabridged content for $6.95 monthly or $50 yearly. Many of the links to additional materials require subscription to the premium service. A free seven-day trial subscription to the Deluxe service is available through the Web site.

Similar to Encarta Concise, Encyclopedia.Com is an abridged online encyclopedia run by the Electric Library. It's a fee-based reference service with a variety of subscription options. Again, you can search by keyword or browse by topic alphabetically. Article entries are drawn from the Concise Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia and are much shorter than those in Encarta or Funk and Wagnalls. For example, the main entry under Scotland was a meager 200 words.

However, Encyclopedia.Com does a nice job of cross-referencing related topics--such as Scotland Yard, Glasgow, Highlands--and automatically runs your query through Alta Vista, Yahoo, and WebCrawler to provide supplemental Web links. Like Encarta, the site hawks a lot of related premium content that you can access for a fee.

Fun, But Still Some Bugs

InfoPlease.com is another good option for quick-and-dirty reference work. It basically functions like a closed search engine, running topic key words through its unabridged version of the fifth edition Columbia Encyclopedia, a dictionary, and a series of topical almanacs for sports, entertainment, world news, technology, and more. When you enter your topic keyword, InfoPlease generates a results page from which you click over to any of the relevant entries. You can choose to search within any or all of the reference sources.

The full-length articles are nicely indexed and relatively generous. For my sample search, InfoPlease produced an entry of around 3500 words for Scotland.

One caveat: In several days of testing, InfoPlease proved to be by far the slowest and buggiest of the online encyclopedias, often stalling or reloading pages for no discernible reason.

Any of these services is useful for online research, but Funk and Wagnalls is definitely the one to bookmark. At any rate, they all certainly beat researching the old-fashioned way. It's almost enough to make you want to go back to school. Almost.