WIEM Encyklopedia

» see portalwiedzy.onet.pl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Poland had a national encyclopedia on its national portal, free, for most of two decades. Turkey did not get one. The Turkish web i was on in 2001 had portals and it had forums. If you needed a fact in your own language you asked somebody or you opened a book, and if you could read English you went and found the answer in English. That gap is the reason a country having its own reference work on its own portal reads to me as a genuine piece of national infrastructure rather than as an ordinary website.

The full name is Wielka Interaktywna Encyklopedia Multimedialna, which shortens to WIEM, which happens to mean "I know" in Polish. It started as paper. Fogra Multimedia published Popularna Encyklopedia Powszechna from 1994 and followed it with a multimedia edition in 1998, around 66,000 entries on disc. That same year it went online at encyklopedia.pl.

Onet.pl bought it in 2000 and put it where the traffic was. Poland's largest portal now had the largest Polish-language encyclopedia on the web attached to it, later under the name Portal Wiedzy, sitting alongside the study and exam services Onet ran for students. By the ninth online edition in 2006 it held about 125,000 entries, and it was still roughly that size seven years later.

That number is the whole story of this kind of encyclopedia. Entries were commissioned and edited and counted, and the count was a promise about quality. It was also a ceiling. Polish Wikipedia started in september 2001 and had no ceiling, because it had no editorial payroll to run out of.

~ the dossier ~

~ the two paid years ~

From 2004 until 2 march 2006, WIEM was not free. Onet put it behind a payment, and then took the payment away again and went back to free access.

Look at what those dates sit on top of. Between 2004 and 2006, Polish Wikipedia went from a curiosity to the obvious first place to look, growing hardest in precisely the window when the alternative was asking a Polish reader for money. When the paywall came off in 2006, the habit it had interrupted was not waiting to be resumed. Encarta made the same bet in the same years and lost it the same way, which suggests the mistake was structural rather than Polish.

~ the day it died ~

There was no announcement. The archive gives the bracket instead: portalwiedzy.onet.pl was still serving the encyclopedia on 21 september 2017, and by 23 october the same address was answering with a redirect. The content was folded into Onet's question and answer service, which is the polite way a portal retires something it no longer wants to staff. Nineteen years, and the death certificate is a change of HTTP status code.

The shape here is not really Polish. Every language that had a portal in 1999 had a version of this: a paid or sponsored reference work with a fixed number of entries and an editor in charge, which was the best thing available until an unpaid one in the same language got large enough. WIEM lasted a lot longer than most, because Onet kept it running for eleven years after it had already lost the argument. That is worth something. Somebody there clearly did not want to be the one who switched it off.

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