[Foundation-l] Encarta is dead

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2009/3/31 Ziko van Dijk <zvandijk at googlemail.com>:
> So, this means that there remains no big encyclopedia but ours? Except
> Britannica? And what about the situation in French, Italian etc., has anyone
> an overview about that?

Enciclopèdia Catalana [1] is a very good free-as-in-beer online
encyclopedia in the Catalan Language. Many of its articles about
Catalan culture are also translated into English. (To see if an
article has an English version, click the "Encyclopaedia" button.) The
same company also offers at least three comprehensive dictionaries -
the general monolingual Gran Diccionari (complete with full
conjugations and etymologies), the excellent DIDAC for children [2],
and Multilingüe - Catalan-Spanish-German-English-French [3]. I don't
understand how do they do it without any advertising. Maybe the
government helps it, but that is just a guess.

Anyway, the fact is that it is a strong competitor against the Catalan
Wikipedia and Wiktionary and it is also a strong competitor against
English Wikipedia for people who seek information about Catalan
culture.

So the answer is No - not all major encyclopedias are dead, and that
is a Good Thing.

[1] www.grec.cat
[2] http://www.grec.net/cgibin/esc00.pgm/
[3] http://www.grec.cat/cgibin/mlt00.pgm

-- 
Amir Elisha Aharoni

heb: http://haharoni.wordpress.com | eng: http://aharoni.wordpress.com
cat: http://aprenent.wordpress.com | rus: http://amire80.livejournal.com

"We're living in pieces,
 I want to live in peace." - T. Moore