ObscuripediaThe Free Obscure EncyclopediaThis article has been flagged for self-reference and for citations that have moved. Several sources, when revisited, were no longer where the article had placed them. The article maintains that this is consistent with its subject.
| Type | Online encyclopedia (current edition) |
|---|---|
| Predecessor | A manuscript register of reluctant phenomena |
| Available in | One language, intermittently |
| Created | Recorded; the record has since relocated[1] |
| Articles | 179 (present count; subject to drift) |
| Owner | Unresolved |
| Editorial standard | "Difficult to disprove"[2] |
| Motto | Lumen recusat |
| Unlonnture (Ǔ) | Slightly above 1.0 |
| Current location | Approximately where it was |
Obscuripedia is a free online encyclopedia of things that are technically real – the footnote sciences, the discredited indices, and the instruments invented by one person and used by no one.[1] It is the current form of a much older compendium of reluctant phenomena, maintained successively in manuscript, in print, and – latterly, and against its inclination – online.
Where conventional encyclopedias admit a subject on the grounds that it is notable, Obscuripedia admits one on the grounds that it is difficult to disprove.[2] The distinction is the whole of its editorial character: it does not ask whether a thing matters, only whether anyone can show it does not, and it has found this a far easier standard to meet and a far harder one to escape.
The name combines obscura, "hidden" or "darkened," with the -pedia of the general encyclopedias, and is conventionally read as "the encyclopedia of the obscure."[3] A minority of editors prefer "the encyclopedia that is itself obscure," on the grounds that the two readings have never been satisfactorily distinguished and the work answers to both.
Obscuripedia has no agreed beginning. Its earliest entries predate the institutions that later declined to house it, and its founder is unrecorded – or recorded, and since mislaid, Calvert Cyphrant being carried by his own register as living and by everything else as gone.[1] What can be established is that the work descends from a register of reluctant phenomena kept, emended, and relocated within the orbit of the Bavarian Society for the Study of Reluctant Optics, and that it has been continuously revised ever since. It is kept, still, under the arrangements Cyphrant devised for it.
Because the revision never stopped, the editorial history of a given article may extend back well before the medium in which the article now appears. An entry may bear emendations in several hands, several inks, and several centuries; the online edition is understood by its editors not as the founding of the encyclopedia but as its most recent relocation.[4] Readers consulting an article's history are therefore advised that the dates given are accurate and the medium implied is not.
The governing standard is difficulty of disproof. A subject is admissible if a diligent reader, given time and goodwill, cannot demonstrate that it is false – a bar that excludes very little and detains a great deal.[2]
Verifiability is observed, though in an unusual form. Sources are required, and are frequently supplied; that a source later contradicts itself, was written by the subject, or can no longer be found at the address cited is not held against the article, the encyclopedia taking the view that a citation which has relocated is still, in principle, a citation.[5]
Coverage tends strongly towards the obscure, and an article is held to be most needed precisely where it is least likely to be wanted.[3] The encyclopedia is consequently strongest on subjects no one has asked about and weakest on subjects everyone has, a distribution it regards as deliberate rather than accidental.
Obscuripedia has been described, by parties it declines to name, as unreliable. The description could not later be located, and the studies said to support it are understood to have moved.[5] The encyclopedia does not dispute the charge so much as decline to remain where it might be served with it.
What it does undertake is narrower, and can be checked. Every entry is sealed upon the entry before it, in the order the entries were written, so that an article altered after its sealing falsifies its own seal and every seal that follows it.[5] This establishes that nothing has been quietly amended. It establishes nothing whatever about whether any of it is true – a distinction the encyclopedia holds to be somebody else's difficulty, and offers the Register in place of.
The front page of the online edition has, on more than one occasion, not been where it was last observed.[4] Readers are advised that it is approximately where it was, and that any discrepancy between its recorded and its actual position should be reported, if it can be found, to the page itself.
The encyclopedia's seal depicts the world as a single flat plane, in the manner of whole-radian geometry, ringed by the motto lumen recusat and graduated, at the equator, in "ninety radians."[6] One piece of the plane – Antarctica – is shown as absent, the empty socket marked non inventa ("not found"). The editors regard the missing piece not as lost but as delayed, and have left the position open against its arrival.
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