Enciklopedio Kalblanda

» see mebsuta.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Esperanto has always had a strange relationship with the web, in that its speakers were early adopters of every network technology going back to the 1980s and there were never very many of them. That produces projects like this one, ambitious in scope and built by one person who wanted a thing to exist in their language more than they wanted anyone in particular to read it.

Stefano Kalb registered mebsuta.com on 11 January 1996 and put an encyclopedia at /enc/. He wrote it and edited it himself from 1996 to 2001. It ended up with 139 articles, and he released the text, though not the images, under the GNU Free Documentation License. That licensing decision is the only reason this grave has a body to point at.

In December 2001 he took the articles and uploaded them into the Esperanto Wikipedia, which had launched in November of that year and had almost nothing in it. Kalblanda was not edited again. Kalb kept working, on Wikipedia, until 2007.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what was in it ~

139 articles is a number worth sitting with. Encarta's 1996 edition had around 26,000. Britannica had more. A one-person encyclopedia is not competing on coverage and was never going to, and the point of Kalblanda was that a speaker of Esperanto could look something up and get a page written in Esperanto rather than a translation of one written for somebody else.

The surviving capture of the contents page is from August 2004, three years after the last edit, which means the site kept answering long after it had stopped being worked on. mebsuta.com today redirects to a parking lander.

~ the handover ~

Most encyclopedia graves on this site are about someone losing an argument with a free competitor. Encarta went that way, and so did Nupedia. Kalb read the same situation and drew the opposite conclusion: he saw a project that could carry his work further than he could, checked that his own license allowed it, and moved 139 articles across in one go.

The Esperanto Wikipedia holds around 389,000 articles today and is one of the larger ones relative to the number of people who speak the language, and some fraction of its earliest text came out of one man's website. That is the outcome a GFDL release was designed to produce, and it almost never happens this cleanly, because it requires the author to decide that the text mattered more than the domain it was sitting on.

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