The Encyclopedia of Sci-fi Goes Live Online 82
arcite writes "After twenty years of hard work, the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction website has recently gone live. It's an online database containing thousands of entries for all things Sci-fi, and a great place to read all about your favourite authors, characters, themes, and everything else."
Who cares about deletionists? (Score:4, Insightful)
Who cares about deletionists? They're the last thing we need.
http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/notes_on_content [sf-encyclopedia.com]
Seems to just be a long list bragging about all the stuff they deleted. Golf clap for them. I'm so glad I won't be able to find stuff I'm trying to find, just what I always wanted in a website.
Bye bye guys don't forget to rm -Rf / on the way out.
Random CAPITALIZATION (Score:4, Insightful)
I must SAY that the complete CAPITALIZATION of every LINK in each ARTICLE makes it extremely DIFFICULT for me to READ. Perhaps there are PEOPLE that don't mind READING such oddly CAPITALIZED ARTICLES, but I am not one of THEM.
Re:Holes and Holes (Score:3, Insightful)
Eh, I think the Kilgore Trout entry is rather exemplary (in a bad way). Here is their entire entry:
An sf-writer character in Kurt VONNEGUT Jr's God Bless You, Mr Rosewater (1965) and Breakfast of Champions (1973), first used as a pseudonym by L W CURREY and David G HARTWELL for a short bibliography, SF-I: A Selective Bibliography (1971 chap), and later (there was a row about this) by Philip José FARMER on the novel Venus on the Half-Shell (1975). [PN]
No mention of Slaughterhouse-Five, which is easily his most famous appearance, or the other half dozen or so Vonnegut books he was featured in. Worse still, their phrasing strongly implies that God Bless You and Breakfast of Champions were his only two appearances which is flat out inaccurate. Compare to Wikipedia, which has over a page on Kilgore Trout and lists every appearance and gives more "biographical" information. I know it's not really fair to compare to Wikipedia, but the fact is, if you're going to make an Encyclopedia dedicated to a narrow focus, it requires more content in that area than any general encyclopedia, or it's pretty worthless.
Re:OK can we agree this site sucks? (Score:4, Insightful)
After quickly looking around, I was able to identify plenty of books/shows/movies that are not mentioned at all. And those that are mentioned are given only quite brief articles. When you compare the coverage to what Wikipedia has, this new site looks rather small. When you also think about how much material there is in Memory Alpha [memory-alpha.org], Wookiepedia [wikia.com], and all the other franchise-specific wikis, then this new site seems positively embarrassingly small.
However after reading a few articles, I think it does bring something new. In particular, the essays are not the factual NPOV articles that Wikipedia strives for. They are in fact highly opinionated about the quality and historic impact of various parts of SF. While I didn't agree with all the entries, they seemed mostly well-researched, and had lots of historical information and pointed out other works were given themes had also been explored.
My point is that this site gives us a different perspective. The essays and opinion pieces should be interesting to most anyone interested in SF. However I think calling it "The Encyclopedia of Sci-Fi" is a mistake. "Encyclopedia", in the modern Internet age, implies detailed coverage, in both breadth and depth; this site provides neither, from what I can see. Rather than advertising it as an authoritative factual cataloging of every SF work ever produced (which, again, is what "encyclopedia" means to most people nowadays, for better or worse), they should be emphasizing that they are providing an assortment of opinion pieces about the history of SF, written by selected experts.