Will whoever said it please stand up?
We've probably all heard someone compare the web to an encyclopedia, though it
doesn't seem that many people have been willing to put that claim in writing.
Finding examples of this proved to be rather difficult, and I found considerably
less results than I expected.
Partly this is because it's hard to know precisely what phrase we're looking for,
but it's undoubtedly also because those phrases show up less frequently than I
expected. It may also be because the sort of phrase I'm looking for belongs to
an earlier time when introductory sites to the internet as a whole still flourished.
New sites of this sort may still be out there, though I get the feeling that they're
not (and yes, this is a logical topic for a future column) and many of the old
ones may have disappeared. So among what can be found are the phrases:
The
Internet is an enormous encyclopedia just waiting for you and your family to
tap into it.
(No date given, but the phrase "you can get a quality 28.8 kbps, V.34 modem
for less than $200.00" dates it as veritably ancient.)
The
Internet is a giant encyclopedia, with one main difference; there are moving
pictures.
(This one is apparently from 1999, and by Junior High School Students, so it
is perhaps forgiveable.)
The Internet is a vast encyclopedia
of information written by millions, but you still want to be sure the publisher
has good credentials.
(This one, around for eight years, is still active. It's from a site devoted
to quilting, but rightly assumes that many of the people who find their way
to the site know very little about using the internet, and thus includes a few
introductory pages on what to do and how to use the web.)
The Internet is one big encyclopedia
if you know how to find the information being sought.
(From a regularly updated Jewish geneology site.)
But I suppose that I shouldn't complain about not finding many phrases of this
sort. After all, my claim, I think, is that the web and an encyclopedia aren't
at all the same thing.
Go to: Too Common Knowledge.