Yahoo! Japan Encyclopedia

» see 100.yahoo.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

On 27 November 2008 Yahoo! Japan put the whole of Shogakukan's Nipponica on the web for free. That is around 130,000 entries and half a million searchable keywords, the standard general-purpose Japanese encyclopedia, no account and no payment. Entries came with images and audio where the print edition had them, and Shogakukan kept about thirty people adding new material every month.

The thing that separated it from the reference site everybody actually used was the byline. Nipponica entries are signed by the specialist who wrote them, and the online version kept the signatures. You could look at an article about a fish or a treaty and see the name of the person answerable for it. Wikipedia's Japanese edition was already larger by 2008 and growing faster, and it had no such thing.

It ran for five years and one week and closed on 3 December 2013. No reason was published. Yahoo! Japan went on to partner with Kotobank, which is run by Asahi Shimbun and licenses Shogakukan and Kodansha material, so the content did not disappear from the Japanese web. It stopped being at Yahoo's address, and five years of links and citations pointed there.

~ the record ~

~ what shogakukan handed over ~

Publishers spent the 2000s trying to work out what a reference book was worth once search existed. The safe answer was a paywall. Shogakukan took the other option and let a portal give the whole thing away, presumably on advertising, and for five years it was one of the few places where a major publisher's full encyclopedia sat open on the web with nothing in front of it.

In 2010 it took the fourth JEPA electronic publishing award for network content, which is the Japanese publishing industry telling itself this was the right direction. Three years after the award the service was closed. The industry's actual direction turned out to be licensing bundles to aggregators like Kotobank, where the same articles now sit next to five other publishers' work.

~ beta, for five years ~

It launched as a beta and it was still a beta when it shut. Nobody ever removed the label. There is a version of this that is just Yahoo leaving a tag in the template, and a version where the beta label was doing real work, keeping expectations low on a service whose continuation depended on a contract nobody outside the two companies could see.

The logo carried the badge to the end. The archived masthead reads Yahoo! JAPAN, then the four characters for encyclopedia, then BETA in small red type, on a service with 130,000 professionally written and edited entries behind it.

~ the shelf at home ~

In Turkey the encyclopedia was furniture. Sets like AnaBritannica and Meydan Larousse were sold on installment plans and delivered a volume at a time. They ended up in the living rooms of families who were buying a claim on their children's future as much as a reference work. A row of dark spines, opened a few times a year for homework.

That object was dead everywhere by 2008, and what replaced it in most countries was Wikipedia. Japan is one of the few places where a publisher tried the middle path, putting the professional article on the free web with the author's name still attached and keeping the editorial staff employed. It worked well enough to win an award and not well enough to reach a sixth birthday.

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