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| Dear Encyclosphere Community, Our team is delighted to present the highlights of the past quarter’s activities and discussions within the Encyclosphere community. Here’s a summary of the key updates and achievements: New encyclopedias added: We now have 1.4 million articles stored as ZWI files. Here are the new encyclopedias in the encyclosphere since our last update:EncyloSearch.org added Conservapedia, CreationWiki, Encyclopedia Astronautica, Encyclopedia of American Industries, Encyclopedia of Business, Encyclopedia of Management, Encyclopedia of Small Business, Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing (FOLDOC), Glottopedia, MDWiki, RationalWiki, Wikidoc, and Wikiversity.EncycloReader.org added Wikiversity, Wikidoc and Oldpedia Major encycloreader.org changes: External search in 22 online encyclopedias, 30 million encyclopedic articles written in 12 languages plus English. The ZWI file for any article can be downloaded from the page where you are viewing the article. ZWI files are signed using the standard DID:PSQR, and we have a validator! Join the Encyclosphere Mattermost workspace: The community successfully migrated to Mattermost. If you’ve joined us on Slack previously, we’re no longer active there. Please join us on Mattermost to stay connected and engaged with the community. Larry’s article on the AI Threat: Larry’s thought-provoking article serves as a wake-up call, emphasizing the importance of the Encyclosphere and search engines in addressing this threat. Technical Updates and Resources: We’re now sharing comprehensive documentation on uploading files to an aggregator for the encyclosphere. Please review and provide commentary via email or Mattermost, or set up your own aggregator if you’re technically inclined. EncycloShare, a WordPress plugin developed by the KSF, is nearly ready to be installed on WordPress-based encyclopedia sites, enabling signed DID (distributed identity) and aggregation within the encyclosphere network. Language and Content Access: The community collectively decided to use ISO codes instead of flags to represent languages in the Encyclosphere project. Specifically, the focus will be on ISO 639-2 two-letter language codes. This decision was made to further enable content in regions outside of English, respecting the original content while allowing for better search indexing and translations as the network expands. Survey Results and Data Organization: In 2023 we conducted a survey asking what encyclopedia topics are of interest. We would like to thank each of you who responded. The write-up is brief but a little long for this newsletter. Read the results of the survey. Fundraiser and Server Space: We are finalizing details for a fundraiser to secure additional server space and equipment. Stay tuned for the launch of the fundraiser promotion, and we deeply appreciate your support. Volunteer Opportunities: We are seeking volunteers for various tasks, such as OCR, proofreading, and offering terminal server access. Your contributions in these areas will greatly assist Encyclosphere initiatives. We would like to remind you of some topics that we mentioned in our last email: Buy Encyclosphere merchandise! If you want to show your support for the cause (and the KSF does get a cut of the proceeds), please pick up an Encyclosphere mug, t-shirt, hoodie, or cap at our online store.Help develop Encyclone.org, a Yacy-powered encyclopedia search engine. If you are a developer and are interested, please respond to this email. Extensive free database of encyclopedias:librarian and database help requested. The KSF has compiled a database of encyclopedias (743 entries so far). We need your help adding entries and improving the web app front-end so that we can release it to the public. The main purpose of the database is to accelerate populating the Encyclosphere. We are using the database to give our developers ideas for what to add to Encyclone, EncyloReader.org, and EncycloSearch.org. Furthermore, the Old Encyclopedia Digitization Project (OEDP) digitizes public domain paper encyclopedias so that they, too, can be added to Encyclone (via Oldpedia.org) and, from there, into the Encyclosphere. We know there are thousands of encyclopedias digitized to one degree or another in the archive.org and Google Books collections. Please respond to this email if you’re interested in helping with the database. OEDP volunteers are still needed! Please respond to this email if you’re interested.Finally, please check out our active projects page for opportunities to volunteer (including development!), then join us on Mattermost! And we want to acknowledge and thank all of you who are also grassroots financial supporters. We are humbled and grateful for your one-time and monthly contributions! If you’ve been thinking about making a donation, now is a good time to do so! Support the KSF. That’s all for this edition of the Encyclosphere Newsletter. We appreciate your active participation and contributions that make the encyclosphere thrive. We meet every Friday at 2pm U.S. Eastern time: encyclosphere.org/meet. We hope you’ll join us! Best regards, Encyclosphere Team |
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