Glossary

Encyclopedia: a collection of articles, whether digital or in print, that is primarily of encyclopedia articles (q.v.).

Encyclopedia article: an article, at least a paragraph in length, that offers a general, wide-ranging discussion of both the meaning and the main characteristics of something. Generally. they are introductory: they are written to introduce neophytes to the topic, but academic encyclopedia articles tend, instead, to document what is known or theorized. In either case, the article may be said to characterize the topic as such, in generalities, rather than making specific, specialized claims about it. Such articles are often contained in things called encyclopedias (encyclopædias, encyclopaedias, cyclopedias) both digital and printed. Some articles in things called dictionaries, handbooks, companions, or compendiums are also encyclopedia articles. To complicate the matter, not all reference works called "encyclopedias"contain any encyclopedia articles at all. Websites and print publications that are not generally encyclopedias,, dictionaries, handbooks, companions, etc., may contain writing that may serve as encyclopedia articles. Encyclopedia articles are generally distinguished from a rather long list of related things, which are not "encyclopedic": dictionary definitions, which document a term's meaning; academic papers, which provide original research on a topic without saying much by way of general characterization; statistical handbook entries, which contain tables of information usually without explaining it; "how-to" articles, which explain the procedures for doing something, often in a very introductory way, but which usually leave core concepts (or people and places, etc.) unexplained; and so forth.

Encyclosphere: a collection of encyclopedias on the Internet; used by the KSF in two senses, as follows.

(a) encyclosphere (lowercase): the collection of all encyclopedias, particularly those available on the Internet, although sometimes we extend the term to refer to the set of all encyclopedias, tout court.

(b) Encyclosphere (uppercase): the particular collection of encyclopedias, initially collected by personnel and volunteers associated with the Knowledge Standards Foundation, and made available via search engines (especially EncycloReader.org and EncycloSearch.org), APIs (for ease of bulk download), IPFS, WebTorrent, and other methods. For details, see Encyclosphere.

ZWI (file type): the standard file type for encyclopedia articles. Short for Zipped Wiki, the file was originally used to encapsulate, in a ZIP archive, all the data needed to convey a nicely-styled and media-rich encyclopedia article, first found on various wiki encyclopedias, but soon expanded to all sorts of pages. Proper, fully-developedi ZWI files have several key features: (1) multiple versions of the article, including at a minimum HTML and plaintext, but often wikitext (MediaWiki format); (2) a metadata.json file, which contains various information, such as the name of the article, the encyclopedia, the source URL, etc.; (3) CSS styling and image data; (4) a signature file, and ancillary files, which ensure that the ZWI file has been published with the use of a self-owned digital identity that can be found at a web server (following the DID:PSQR standard). Examples of ZWI files may be found linked on any article page on EncycloSearch or EncycloReader; the files most recently produced by the latter can be found at encycloreader.org/db.