Wikipedia The Volunteer Encyclopedia Compilations of reference facilities abound on the web.Infoplease have a useful selection, including almanacs for current information. One of the innovations of the web is the great co-operative encyclopedia, Wikipedia, which now attracts 50m+ hits a day. Written by volunteers, it spans over 700,000 articles in English, with smaller quantities in dozens of other languages. Individuals can edit the contributions, but their changes are monitored by teams of other volunteers, so there are controls over what appears. A real plus is that entries can be updated in a matter of hours when something significant changes. Traditional encyclopedias have migrated online and can be useful for general knowledge queries, especially in fields where current events are not likely to outdate entries. Free offerings tend to be smaller, or older, versions: Encyclopedia Britannica offers only limited results unless you buy a subscription. Other possibilities include the Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, with over 50,000 entries,
and Microsoft's Encarta, through the free pass offered in MSN Search (their paid service covers some 60,000 articles). Yearbooks or almanacs may lack changes that have occurred since publication; it's another area where the net can keep ahead. The online version of the CIA World Fact book is updated through the year. It offers a welter of facts and figures on the countries of the world, and is also downloadable.
Experts:
ProfNet provides links to thousands of news and information officers in the Americas, Europe and Africa, and offers a searchable database of 16,000+ experts (mostly in the US, UK and Canada, it appears). They operate for email queries on weekdays from 9am to 11pm, Greenwich Mean Time. Journalism Net has a good round-up of sources for experts from various countries and different disciplines.
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