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Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

britannica11.org

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Re: Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

#21

Post by ahaspel »

gnerd00 wrote: post #10
ahaspel wrote: post #2

I rebuilt the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica into a clean, structured, navigable site: https://britannica11.org/ What it does: – ~37k articles reconstructed from the original volumes – section-level structure (contents are clickable within articles) – cross-references extracted and linked – contributors indexed and searchable – original volume + page references preserved and shown while reading – links to the original…

legal terms question here also -- several major world economies are operating under very different rules regarding datasets and publication rights. I am in the USA / California.. will there be terms for me, given that I am not a giant deep-pockets FAANG, just a book person ? commercial use terms for "small business" scale ?

The 1911 text itself is public domain, so anyone is free to use it.

What I’ve built here is a structured edition — the parsing, reconstruction, linking, indexing, etc. I haven’t published a formal license for that yet.

For casual or small-scale use there’s no issue at all. For bulk use (e.g. dataset / training / redistribution), I’d prefer people get in touch so I can figure out a sensible way to support that.

Re: Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

#22

Post by realityfactchex »

logicallee wrote: post #3
ahaspel wrote: post #2

I rebuilt the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica into a clean, structured, navigable site: https://britannica11.org/ What it does: – ~37k articles reconstructed from the original volumes – section-level structure (contents are clickable within articles) – cross-references extracted and linked – contributors indexed and searchable – original volume + page references preserved and shown while reading – links to the original…

Thanks so much for sharing this. It looks fantastic. A couple of questions, if you don't mind: what license are you releasing this under, if any? Is there any way to download it? The reason someone might want to download it is for use as training data.

> Is there any way to download it? The reason someone might want to download it is for use as training data.

Another reason would be to able to keep running/using it even if the main site were to go down for whatever reason eventually; or, to operate a mirror of it, for redundancy (linking back to the original, of course).

Re: Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

#23

Post by ks2048 »

ahaspel wrote: post #14
indigodaddy wrote: post #12

Just as a random data point, I searched for Genghis and nothing came up. Was there not much knowledge on Genghis Khan in 1911 I wonder?

Try Jenghiz Khan. That's how they used to spell it then. Or just plain Khan and scroll the results.

Yes. Here is the article,

https://britannica11.org/article/15-0341-jenghiz-khan/jenghi...

Re: Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

#24

Post by indigodaddy »

ahaspel wrote: post #14
indigodaddy wrote: post #12

Just as a random data point, I searched for Genghis and nothing came up. Was there not much knowledge on Genghis Khan in 1911 I wonder?

Try Jenghiz Khan. That's how they used to spell it then. Or just plain Khan and scroll the results.

Interesting! Thanks

Re: Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

#26

Post by Aardwolf »

Very neat!

Some bugs I noticed:

Searching for Zurich allows you to go to the article for the canton of Zurich, not the city. Clicking the link "Zürich (city)" inside of this article, opens this same article again about the canton, rather than opening the actual article for the city

When viewing an article, the search for articles (leftmost search box) doesn't seem to work at all for me (in Firefox). When being on the main page, it does work

There's a small clickable 'home' button on the right, but muscle memory from how other websites work makes me expect that clicking the big title "Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th Edition" on the top left also goes to home

Re: Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

#27

Post by shantara »

Interesting how different both the tone and the structure of the articles are compared to the modern texts.

Take the article about Copenhagen as an example: https://britannica11.org/article/07-0111-copenhagen/copenhag... The geography and key points of interest are described very accurately, but the authors aren’t shy about inserting emotionally charged adjectives and personal options on what they consider interesting or curious. Also, the huge portion about the Battle of Copenhagen in the bottom is a complete departure and shifts the genre from a geographical description to the shot-per-shot narration of a naval battle.

Re: Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

#28

Post by ahaspel »

Aardwolf wrote: post #26

Very neat! Some bugs I noticed: Searching for Zurich allows you to go to the article for the canton of Zurich, not the city. Clicking the link "Zürich (city)" inside of this article, opens this same article again about the canton, rather than opening the actual article for the city When viewing an article, the search for articles (leftmost search box) doesn't seem to work at all for me (in Firefox). When being on the…

Excellent points. There are indeed two Zurich articles. One way to get to the city is to search for Zurich and open the second one, which goes to the city directly. The xref in Zurich (canton) is indeed a disambiguation bug (identically named articles); thanks for catching that.

I haven't tested the article search box on the article viewer in Firefox. I'll look into that as well.

Making the title linkable is a great idea and it will be implemented shortly. Thanks for catching all of this.

Re: Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

#29

Post by ahaspel »

logicallee wrote: post #17
ahaspel wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! The underlying text (1911 edition) is public domain, but the structured version here — the parsing, reconstruction, and linking — is something I put together for this site. Right now there isn’t a bulk download available. I’m considering exposing structured access (API or dataset) in some form, but haven’t decided exactly how that will work yet. If you have a specific use case in mind (especially for training…

Regarding the specific use case, I was thinking this: I had Gemma 4 (a small but highly capable offline model released by Google) make a public domain cc0 encyclopedia of some core science and technology concepts[1]. I thought it was pretty good. Separately, I've fine-tuned the Gemma 4 model[2], it was very quick (just 90 seconds), so I think it could be interesting to train it to talk like 1911 Encyclopedia Britanni…

That’s a fun idea — I can see the appeal of that style.

The underlying text is public domain, but the structured version here is something I put together for the site. I haven’t released a bulk dataset yet.

If you end up experimenting with it, I’d love to hear how it turns out — and I’m still figuring out what structured access might look like.

Re: Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

#30

Post by ahaspel »

entrepy123 wrote: post #25

Bravo. People who like the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica might like https://OldEncyc.com to dig into the volumes (by letter range) of 22 editions of old encyclopedias dated 1728-1926 (though not searchable like the OP).

I hadn’t seen that before, it’s a great collection. I like the breadth across editions.
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