Encyclopedia ynet (אנציקלופדיה ynet)

» see ynet.co.il as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Building it took about a year and a half and a team of roughly ten people. Michal Schechter managed it and Dr. Emanuel Lottem handled the scientific editing, with Yon Feder, editor-in-chief of ynet, leading the project. A trial version opened to the public in December 2002. In November 2003 it launched properly, and launching properly meant becoming a subscription site.

A good deal of the content was not written for the web at all. It was lifted out of four printed Hebrew encyclopedias: Dr. Rafael Pozner's Israeli General Encyclopedia, Shaul Meizlish's encyclopedia of Jewish concepts and tradition, Azaria Alon's Fauna and Flora of the Land of Israel, and a New Encyclopedic Lexicon edited by Prof. Michael Feldman with entries by David Shaham. That is a real asset and also the thing that dated it. A print encyclopedia is a snapshot with a publication year attached, and moving it to a web page does not give it a second one.

The homepage worked through twelve subject gates, each subdivided into fields, covering everything from the exact sciences to the performing arts. It deliberately lacked the single most characteristic feature of the ynet news site: there were no talkbacks. Readers could mail in corrections, and entries did get updated on that basis, but the comment thread that defined Israeli web culture in those years was kept out of the reference product on purpose.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ knowledge with responsibility ~

In its early years the marketing rested on a factual claim: this was the only encyclopedia on the internet in the Hebrew language. It was true when they said it and it stopped being true, and the emphasis on the line was quietly reduced rather than retracted.

What replaced it in 2007 is the part worth keeping. The logo gained a slogan, ידע עם אחריות, knowledge with responsibility. The explanation page spelled out the pitch: the internet holds millions of sites on every subject, innocent surfers find it hard to judge the quality and professional accountability of any one of them, and this encyclopedia offers reliable information written and checked by its own in-house team, so you can be certain the information is correct and complete. Nowhere in that paragraph does the word Wikipedia appear. It did not need to. Hebrew Wikipedia was winning the traffic by then, and the answer a professional reference product reached for was a claim about who was accountable for the sentence you were reading.

~ the price of a lookup ~

For its first year, from December 2002, the whole thing was free. After that it went to subscribers only, with a design that has since become completely standard and was novel enough then to need describing: the opening paragraph of every entry stayed free, with a link to the paid full text. Several hundred entries were readable in full without paying, and occasionally the entire encyclopedia was thrown open to everyone.

You could buy monthly or annual access, and there were group rates for schools, arranged through MATACH, the Center for Educational Technology. In the summer of 2005 a free email bulletin called Encyclopedia+ started going out, each issue carrying extensive encyclopedic material on one topic, which is a content-marketing funnel described before anybody called it that. The news site fed the encyclopedia too, linking a few entries a day with free access and wiring encyclopedia results into ynet's own search box. Special projects on the news side dropped references in as well.

~ the neutrality file ~

It got accused of political bias almost immediately, and from both directions, which is roughly what happens to any general reference work published in a country with an argument running. Haaretz had a piece up on 31 December 2003 under a headline about the thing being attacked before it had finished launching. The editors rejected the accusations while conceding some changes in entries flagged as unbalanced. Feder's own position was that an encyclopedia should hold no political stance and no ideology, and should supply facts only.

One editorial decision from that period is worth recording because it is so specific: Encyclopedia ynet ruled that it would not use the descriptor extreme, in either direction. The other recurring complaint was simply about missing entries, and the editors said they were surprised by how esoteric some of the things readers expected to find turned out to be. That is the oldest problem in the reference business, and it is the one a volunteer encyclopedia with no page budget solves for free.

~ the way out ~

There was no drama at the end. In December 2020 the encyclopedia came down off ynet, leaving a closing notice at the old homepage address that the Internet Archive caught on the first day of 2021. Eighteen years online, seventeen of them charging money, taken out of the navigation of a news site that had long since stopped needing it.

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