Seeking noun: encyclopedia

Encyclopedia

An encyclopedia is a written summary of all the knowledge, or a particular type of knowledge, accumulated by humans in the past.

"Encyclopedia" usually refers to a large collection of books. The word is first used in the West from the Greek εγκ?κλιο? (Latin alphabet: enkyklios) and παιδε?α (paideia). "enkyklios" means "cyclic, periodic, usual", while "paideia" means "education". ". The meaning is "general education, literally the study of the arts and sciences for a person who wants to be educated as a generalist". In the process of transcription the word "encyclopaedia" passed into Neo-Latin and then into English, first recorded in 1531. In Neo-Latin the word was chosen as the title of a reference work covering various subjects. In England it was first seen in 1644.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the largest encyclopedia in the world is the Yongle Dictionary.

The Chinese Encyclopedia - Press and Publication volume is defined as "a tool book that summarizes the knowledge of all the disciplines of mankind or of a particular discipline. For checking the required knowledge and factual information. But also has the role of expanding the reader's knowledge horizons and helping the systematic search for knowledge. It is a sign of the development of science and culture in a country and an era."

The Concise Dictionary of Social Sciences is defined as "a large-scale tool book organized in the form of a thesaurus, which systematically outlines all aspects or a particular aspect of human knowledge. There are two categories: comprehensive and specialized. Comprehensive encyclopedias collect nouns, idioms, place names, events, people, writings, etc., in all fields of knowledge, is a treasure trove of knowledge. However, they do not include words, so they are different from language dictionaries."

Encyclopedias can be comprehensive, containing relevant content from all fields (e.g., the Encyclopedia Britannica is a famous comprehensive encyclopedia). They can also be specialty encyclopedias (e.g., medical or philosophical encyclopedias). There are also encyclopedias that discuss a wide range of topics from the point of view of a particular culture or country, such as the Great Encyclopedia of the Soviet Union.

History

The ancient Greek scholar Aristotle, who wrote a comprehensive treatise on the learning of his time, is regarded in the West as the "father of the encyclopedia," and the early Han dynasty's "Er Ya," the source of China's encyclopedic writings.

The ancient Chinese class book is an encyclopedic compilation of information. Some scholars also consider China's Yongle Dadian of the Ming Dynasty to be the earliest encyclopedia in the near-modern sense.

Chinese encyclopedias are a style of book introduced from the West in the early 20th century. Li Yuying, a famous scholar during the Republic of China, was the first to conduct research on Western encyclopedias, introducing this book style to China and having a wide impact. Regarding the name of encyclopedia, he said in "Answers to Questions on the Examples of World Encyclopedias", "Forty years ago, Yü translated 'encyclopedia' as 'encyclopedic class dictionary', and after China was influenced by the naming of Sikuquanquan, he changed the name to 'encyclopedic class dictionary'. Later, China, influenced by the nomenclature of the Siku Quanshu, changed the translation to 'encyclopedia'. In the last two centuries, many specialized encyclopedias have been published, including the 'Encyclopedia of Chinese Literature' in Chinese. Literature is one of the subjects in the encyclopedia, though it can be analyzed into many subjects, but under the name of one subject, the word 'encyclopedia' is used again, which is not quite appropriate. And the word 'Quanshu' is easy to be confused with the 'Sikuquan' series of books in Chinese, which is not enough to indicate that it is another book, so Yup was translated as 'XueDian' afterward. The Latin word 'encyclopedia' (the same in English and French), which means 'the academics surrounded by', was later translated into the 'Academic Dictionary'. Later on, all the books that included all the academics and presented the world of knowledge and were mostly arranged in the order of the thesaurus, used this word to form the title of their books, and this word became a kind of book style."

Early encyclopedic works

Encyclopedias by Diderot and others Encyclopedic works are not uncommon in human history, but it was not until the 16th century in the West that the term "encyclopedia" began to appear. The first to use "encyclopedia" for the title of a book was the German Paul Scalich.

Many ancient writers (such as Aristotle and others) have tried to comprehensively record all human knowledge. But it was John Harris who is credited with being the first to create an encyclopedia in the modern sense. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, however, was very plain in its earliest days: only three volumes were published from 1768 to 1771. It is to be feared that the most famous of the early encyclopedias is to be found in the French "Encyclopédie, Dictionnaire d'explication des sciences, arts et métiers", written by D'Alembert and Diderot, and completed in 1772, * * * 28 vols. with 71, 818 entries and 2,885 illustrations.

Body

In ancient times, encyclopedia-like works could be edited all by one person. But in modern times, due to the knowledge explosion, it is no longer possible for one or a few people to complete the compilation of an encyclopedia on a vast scale. This necessitates the development of corpora and the establishment of guidelines for codification in order to resolve conflicts between the many codifiers. (Wikipedia has its own guidelines for codification, see wikipedia:Tools.)

The body of an encyclopedia includes many aspects. These include the design of entry names, outlines for the preparation of entries, writing formats for contributors, requirements for illustrations, rules for writing and translating foreign languages, and book formatting. Among them, the Soviet Encyclopedia is one of the most exhaustive of the existing encyclopedias, the third edition of which is written in a detailed and meticulous manner and is very comprehensive, with a total of 200,000 characters in Chinese characters. For example, under the category of medicine, there are entries on diseases, pathology, treatments, drugs, pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, sanatoriums, medical machinery, and medical careers.

Difference between encyclopedias and other tools

Encyclopedias are different from other tools such as dictionaries. Dictionaries etc. explain the meaning of word entries, while encyclopedias give knowledge about the entries. Therefore, encyclopedias use more images than other tools to aid in the presentation of knowledge. Also, encyclopedias are more detailed than other tools, and often need to be broken down into many subheadings.

Types of encyclopedias

Major encyclopedias (20 volumes or more)

Small encyclopedias

Encyclopedic dictionaries

Comprehensive encyclopedias: mainly aimed at non-specialized readers

Professional encyclopedias

The way of arranging

Modern Western encyclopedias are mostly organized in alphabetical order. The organization. If you focus on the search function, you generally adopt the idea of compiling small entries. If you focus on the educational function of the encyclopedia, you can use the large entries. There are four types of revisions: reprints, supplemental volumes, publication of yearbooks, and successive revisions.

Some common ways of organizing encyclopedias:

Word order arrangement

Category arrangement

Big category arrangement, entries according to the word order

Encyclopedia entries

Encyclopedia entries include the title, the content of the body, and charts and graphs, and so on. The naming of entries is very important in the compilation of an encyclopedia. Good naming should be easy to retrieve, and some scholars believe that the entries should all be independent subjects, and should be based on the guideline of easy retrieval for readers. In addition, the subject matter of the entries should be objectively formed rather than artificially formulated. For example, the Gulf War is an objective fact, while the "myth of the dog" is a man-made theme.

The naming of entries should be clear and unambiguous. For example, it is difficult to define what constitutes a "new type" of weapon.

There are some general principles for the selection of encyclopedia entries:

Principle of independent subject: the subject should be relatively independent, just like when we go to a company to do business, we first think of the company's name and address, rather than one of the departments.

Objective formation principle: the subject should be people in the process of understanding, transformation of the world objectively formed, known to people, rather than artificially formulated. Such as the creation myth is an objective type of mythological subject matter, but the myth of the dog is an artificial generalization of the theme. Thus it lacks recognized normativity and certainty.

The principle of a single theme: e.g. time and space are two themes that should be separated.

Principle of accuracy: the name of the entry should accurately indicate the theme of the entry

Principle of universality: a standardized or conventional name should be used

Principle of nomenclature: the name of the entry should be nominal and static. For example, "the liberation of Hainan Island" should be changed to "the Battle of Hainan Island"

Principle of simplicity: such as the use of Tang poetry, but not Tang Dynasty poetry.

Non-research principle: an encyclopedia is not a research paper

Non-application principle: an encyclopedia is not intended to be a guide to a specific application

(Note: the above is primarily a reference to Document 2)

The categorical structure of the encyclopedia and its continual updating make it well-suited to online or disconnected computerized formats. In recent years, most major encyclopedias have become electronic to varying degrees. Disk-based (especially CD-ROM) publications have the advantages of portability and low cost. At the same time, electronic encyclopedias can include a variety of multimedia formats that traditional media cannot carry, such as animation, audio, or video. Dynamic interlinking of conceptually related articles is also an important advantage. Online encyclopedias, on the other hand, have the advantage of being dynamic: new information can be presented almost immediately, without having to wait for the next publication.