Bitannica general store - Please clisk at this banner to look through the several educational and entertainment products in the britannica store. You find the famous 32 volume ecyclopaedia in paper version, on CD/DVD and online. There is a consise version of the encyclopedia, the britannica yearly book of actual items, encyclopaedia versions made for children and high school students, and much more.

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An encyclopedia is a compendium of a certain size that is ment to encompass all knowledge in the world or all knowledge of a certain field. The compendium is divided in articles about each object treated. The articles are each constructed such that they can be read and understood separately, without reading other articles before or after.

Encyclopedias often contain guides on how to do a variety of things, as well as embedded dictionaries and gazetteers.

The articles in an encyclopedia are ordered in a predetermined way so that they can easily be searched out and  found. The articles in most encyclopedias are ordered alphabetically, but they can be ordered in another lexical or numerical way.  Som encyclopedias have an organization in hierarcical categories.

In addition to the primary organization, there may be several secondary modes of organizations as cross references, references by keywords and in encyclopedias on modern electronic media also keyword search or free text search.

In order to comprehend all knowledge in the size available, most of the knowledge in the articles must be generalized to a certain level. Knoweledge and detailles of a finer level can only be included when they are especially imortant for understanding the subjct as a whole or as examples.

Traditionally encyclopedias was contained in traditional book volumes. They have contained written text graphical pictures and photographs. Nowadays encyclopedias are found as online services, sold on CDs or DVD and can be installed on private PC or servers. This new mediums allow modern encyclopedias to contain live music and video movies in addition to rigid elements as text  and images. They also allow them to contain advanced functions for search by keywords, text combined with disambuigation help.

Traditional encyclopedias are written by experts in the various fields and have rigorous routines for professional and language quality.

The newest development are encyclopedias that are built up and edited by the users, so called wikis. Such encyclopeadias, of which the Wikipedia is the best known, are continually edited and improved by users that include their own knowledge into the database. Such encyclopedias have the advantage of being updated very swiftly.

They also have the advantage of including information that is not yet fully proven, but that can be of value for some people. They have however the problem of articles with various quality levels, with various sizes and depth of information, and it is not always easy to judge weather information is correct or not.

The future development of online encyclopedias will be articles consisting of three main areas. The first area is written by engaged experts and is subjected to rigorousl quality control. The second area will be free to edit for everyone, and can contain additional information. In the third areas users can leave comments and corrections to be concidered by the official editors of the encyclopedia.

By now general software systems for organizing, maintaining, publishing and editing encyclopedias has been developed and can be bought or resceived on tha market. They are generally based on web technology with general database systems in the bottom.  In this way organizations or people can build up their own private encyclopedias. Wikipedia and other wikis are maintained by means of such general software.

Software for publishing encyclopedias on mobile telephones or wap-units is also available by now, and many publishers of encyclopedias offer a mobile service in addition to the traditional web version.

Encyclopedias were developed in the 18th century from dictionaries. Dictionaries show the orthographic writing or a term, show some flectional detailles and a simple definition. The need for more detaiiled explanations were often felt, and this gave the idea of developing the dictionaries into treatises with fuller knowledge.

The pioneers of the first encyclopedias often had a wider idealistic aim. They wanted to preserve all information for the benefit of coming generations so that new development of knowledge could be based upon allready available knowledge in a smooth way and all knowledge be accessible for everyone that needed the knowledge.

The English-language Encyclopædia Britannica and German Brockhaus are well-known examples of general encyclopedias.  Examples of encyclopedias with a particular cultural, ethnic, or national perspective are the Great Soviet Encyclopedia or Encyclopaedia Judaica.

Encyclopedias of special professional fields, as for example medical encyclopedias, may have the aim of comprehending all information known on that field at a given time.

Many people use search engines as a sort of encyclopedia of everything in the world. The web contain after all knowledge of everything. However, the result you get from search engines are not allways what you expect. You get material containing certain words or word combination, but it is not given that much of that material really are articles about the subjects indicated by the words you use, and it is sometimes difficult to get material with the quality you want.

There is by now efforts going on to make search engines that behave in a more encyclopedia like fashion. The great search engines like google and yahoo are moving in that direction, by adding functionallity that make them suitable as a sort of ecyclopedia. AskTheBrain.com is another effort to make a web-based encyclopedia that uses material that is allready on the web and present it in a way that is most useful for a knowledge seeker.