Posted by ahaspel 20 hours ago
Some bugs I noticed:
Searching for Zurich allows you to go to the article for the canton of Zurich, not the city. Clicking the link "Zürich (city)" inside of this article, opens this same article again about the canton, rather than opening the actual article for the city
When viewing an article, the search for articles (leftmost search box) doesn't seem to work at all for me (in Firefox). When being on the main page, it does work
There's a small clickable 'home' button on the right, but muscle memory from how other websites work makes me expect that clicking the big title "Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th Edition" on the top left also goes to home
I haven't tested the article search box on the article viewer in Firefox. I'll look into that as well.
Making the title linkable is a great idea and it will be implemented shortly. Thanks for catching all of this.
For example, if you look up "boiling." You might expect to read about what happens to a liquid when it's heated to a certain temperature, or perhaps a way of cooking foods, or sterilizing equipment. But the entry covers none of those. Instead, the only entry for boiling describes a punishment for persons convicting of poisoning who were, in England, dipped into a large cauldron of boiling water.
And, in the ways that violence and torture were wantonly reveled in centuries ago, they wouldn't just submerge the criminal and let him die there. Instead, they would lower him into the boiling water for a while and then pull him out. They'd repeat the process until eventually they finally killed him. That is the EB 11 ed entry for boiling. Yow!
Mentally the negro is inferior to the white, The remark of F. Manetta, made after a long study of the negro in America, may be taken as generally true of the whole race: “the negro children were sharp, intelligent and full of vivacity, but on approaching the adult period a gradual change set in. The intellect seemed to become clouded, animation giving place to a sort of lethargy, briskness yielding to indolence.
I actually took a recent crack at making a more modern website for Websters 1913: https://websters1913.timcieplowski.com/
There's a bit of funkiness with "<?/" appearing here:
As a time travel machine for the mind, this is great!
It would also be an invaluable resource for any Dungeon Master aspiring to lead a campaign at the end of the 19th century (Sherlock Holmes, or PG Wodehouse style, as it were), as doubtless many here are ...
I didn’t do OCR myself, except for the topic index and to fill in a few gaps. I started from existing Wikisource text and then built a pipeline around that: cleaning (headers, hyphenation, etc.), detecting article boundaries, reconstructing sections, and linking things back to the original page images. Most of the effort went into rendering the complex layouts, and handling the cross-linking, not the initial ingestion.
Glad to go into more detail if you’re interested, but that’s the gist of it.
> Though the offence of eavesdropping still exists at common law, there is no modern instance of a prosecution or indictment.
Thanks for posting this resource, I've often wanted to share a link to this and other entries.
[0]https://britannica11.org/article/08-0867-eavesdrip/eavesdrip...
"anything approaching a uniform distribution of the stars cannot extend Limits of the Universe. indefinitely. It can be shown that, if the density of distribution of the stars through infinite space is nowhere less than a certain limit (which may be as small as we please), the total amount of light received from them (assuming that there is no absorption of light in space) would be infinitely great, so that the background of the sky would shine with a. dazzling brilliancy ...."
[0] https://britannica11.org/article/25-0806-star/star#section-1...
IT says the most likely cause is some sort of "rearrangement of the structure of the elements' atoms" and "supposing a gaseous nebula is destined to condense into a sun, the elementary matter of which it is composed will develop in the process into our known terrestrial and solar elements, parting with energy as it does so". Pretty much as bang on as one could reasonably be given what they knew.
I highly recommend getting an old set of volumes.