Slashdot Mirror
The Encyclopedia of Sci-fi Goes Live Online
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? They're the last thing we need.
http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/notes_on_content
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.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
When they started, there was no Wikipedia. But I guess it shows some sort of grim determination that they bothered to finish?
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
Clicking on their link "characters" gives you this embarrassing crap:
A - Character
B - Character
BATMAN
C - Character
CAPTAIN FUTURE
CAPTAIN HAZZARD
CAPTAIN JUSTICE
CAPTAIN MARVEL
CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT
CAPTAIN VIDEO
CAPTAIN ZERO
CARTER, NICK
D - Character
DALEKS
DOC SAVAGE
E - Character
F - Character
FANTÔMAS
FLASH GORDON
FORD, ASHTON
FU MANCHU
G - Character
GAMERA
GARTH
H - Character
HOLMES, SHERLOCK
I - Character
J - Character
JAMES BOND
JEFF HAWKE
JUDGE DREDD
K - Character
KEMLO
L - Character
M - Character
MODESTY BLAISE
N - Character
NICK CARTER
O - Character
P - Character
PERRY RHODAN
Q - Character
R - Character
RHODAN, PERRY
S - Character
SAINT, THE
SEXTON BLAKE LIBRARY
SHADOW, THE
SHE
SUPERMAN [character]
T - Character
TARZAN
TOM SWIFT
TRIFFID
TROUT, KILGORE
U - Character
V - Character
W - Character
X - Character
Y - Character
Z - Character
The Encyclopedia of Sci-fi Goes Offline
Wikipedia's actually pretty good at sci-fi currently imo. It doesn't go into the level of fan detail on specific works as something like WookiePedia does, but it has pretty good coverage of the authors, novels, and general literary landscape. If anything, its sci-fi coverage is considerably better than its coverage of most other areas of fiction.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
There's also ISFDB. It's just a database of fiction, but it seems to be very complete.
Find free books.
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.
I have mixed feelings about this site.
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, Wookiepedia, 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.
Take a look at WP's article on Robert Heinlein and then at SFE's. Both have useful material. [...] The SFE article is more useful if you're looking for critical commentary, since POV (point of view) is verboten on Wikipedia.
And this is a major difference. The SF Encyclopedia sucks in many, many ways but at least if you look up (say) an author you get a mainstream overview of his writing (I suppose "critical commentary" is the right term). With the WP you get hard facts but still can't tell if this might be an author worth reading.
The SFE article on Theodore Sturgeon was excellent.
All the deleted items listed in the link you provided are things they deleted in the 2nd edition of their book to make room for more worthy material given page limits imposed by their publisher. The very first paragraph makes clear that this is no longer a concern in the online version:
The notes below, from the 1993 second edition, are largely unrevised. In general we have been able to relax many constraints previously forced on us by the space limitations of a single printed volume. Some authors of short stories only, like Vance AANDAHL, appeared in the first edition, were cut to save space in the second and are now restored;
There is nothing in that article that suggests they plan on cutting material because it is non-notable. Only an admission that there is a lot of Sci-Fi out there and only so much time to write. I think they are destined to fail compared to fan contributed sites given this limitation, but that has nothing to do with deletionism.