April 19, 2024 Reading time: 3 minutes

HandWiki stands as a wiki-style encyclopedia specialized in science, technology, computing, and general knowledge. With a focus on fostering scholarly discourse, it serves as a platform for crafting and refining articles, provided one possesses external citations and a registered login account. Beyond mere article creation, HandWiki offers a content management ecosystem, facilitating collaborative editing of original scholarly works, including books, manuals, monographs, and tutorials. These documents seamlessly integrate with HandWiki's extensive repository, linking to thousands of existing articles.

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February 21, 2023 Reading time: 6 minutes

For too long, we have made what has amounted to a Faustian bargain. If you post your comments, your pictures, your videos, your essays, your reviews—your content—on Big Tech’s enormous centralized platforms, then Big Tech will give you free hosting, an audience if you compete well, and some content development tools. It seemed fair. At least, that is how they encourage you to think about this bargain.

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February 21, 2023 Reading time: ~1 minute

New EncycloReader version 2.0 is available (https://encycloreader.org):

• Now it allows reading articles even when Wikipedia and other encyclopedias are blocked by some country/organization, or when they are down due to some technical reasons. This functionality works for 1.5 million most popular articles in the ZWI format.

• This version includes automatic language detection using elements of artificial intelligence.

• Currently EncycloReader serves 33 encyclopedias with different publication policies in 12 languages. Searches can be done in 30 million articles.

S.Chekanov (for KSF)

February 21, 2022 Reading time: 2 minutes

New version (1.6) of https://encycloreader.org for reading encyclopedias of the EncycloSphere project is released. This is another milestone to create a resource that allows searches in about 7.5 million articles from encyclopedias with different publication policies.

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February 21, 2022 Reading time: 2 minutes

Encyclone (http://encyclone.org/) is a web application for crawling, indexing and searches of online encyclopedias. Search can be performed in more than 40 encyclopedias with different publication policies. English is the primary language of the included encyclopedias.

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February 21, 2021 Reading time: ~1 minute

Software developers need to be knowledgeable, creative and innovative in order to succeed in the field, while data scientists use software technology to have insights into large amounts of data they collect. Here is a recent article that can be useful for those who are looking for encyclopedic references to be used in the tech sector (including software development). The article is called HandWiki – an encyclopedia for technicians posted to JobSearchUniverse.com (Career advice) (published on May 24, 2021).

February 21, 2020 Reading time: ~1 minute

In 2020, HandWiki (https://handwiki.org/) has become the largest online wiki encyclopedia of natural sciences and computing. It has more than 105,000 scholarly articles, incorporating the current Wikipedia articles on many research topics, scholarly articles submitted to the Wikipedia foundation, and various wiki books.

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February 21, 2020 Reading time: ~1 minute

Wikipedia remains the world"s biggest information resource used by  communities of volunteers. Most of the other encyclopedic resources are smaller in size  but, compared to Wikipedia,  they are designed for specific areas of expertise and, typically, are maintained by non-for-profit organizations or persons with significant knowledge of specific topics. In many cases, they also have alternative publication policies for accepting online content, as well as the dispute resolution policies which have become  increasingly important for the resources edited by large communities of experts. 

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February 21, 2019 Reading time: 4 minutes

By now you may already know that to add scholarly articles to the English version of Wikipedia is difficult due to the "notability" concept and tight control from anonymous editors (see this article). In recent years, entire Wikipedia topics and articles dedicated to software and data science have been wiped out by a few nameless characters without clearly-indicated scientific credentials. Their user pages are usually empty, and their login names tell nothing. That"s right - the "notability" of articles on Wikipedia is enforced by unnotable editors. This casts significant doubts on their ability to make correct decisions, and on the entire notability concept of wiki-style resources.

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April 22, 2018 Reading time: ~1 minute

About 15,200 scholarly articles permanently removed from Wikipedia in 2018 and 2019 have been restored by the Handwiki team. In 2018 and 2019, such articles  did not pass the Wikipedia"s notability. As the result of this, a lot of useful content  was lost. Articles on software programs and computing were the most affected by this Wikipedia trimming.

Currently the restored Wikipedia articles on computing, science and education can be found in HandWiki (https://handwiki.org). These articles cover the following topics: 

• data analysis and mathematics
• software programs and libraries
• physics, astronomy and technology.

submitted by S.Chekanov

February 21, 2018 Reading time: 7 minutes

There was a time when I just loved Wikipedia. In the early 1980s, the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) were planning a second edition of their semi-historical document but they realized they could not possibly handle all the cross-referencing and indexing of the envisaged new edition. The solution turned to be a major project consisting in "computerizing" the OED. They succeeded in getting successive editions but only after much effort.

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