A matter of record.
It was about a decade ago that someone with whom I then worked on educational internet
sites asked for a list of sites that I thought were necessary in Hebrew in order
to make the educational internet useful to Israeli school children. If I remember
correctly, he had a source that wanted to donate money for translating sites,
and he enlisted me to try and determine what sites deserved to be translated.
I gave him a list of sites that I thought could and should be translated, or built
from scratch in Hebrew - items like the CIA Factbook. I also noted that we had
a burning need for a good Hebrew encyclopedia on the web.
Of course I should have known better. There are now a few Hebrew encyclopedias
on the web. I won't attempt to determine whether they're good or not, since their
worth should be determined more by how they're used than by their content, and
in the educational community it's more accurate to write about misuse than use.
Yes, we were in need of a general reference resource, and yes, it's very good
that we now have a couple of these. But ultimately (and of course even back then
this was obvious) if all we needed was an easy source for copying and pasting,
it wasn't really worth the trouble.
So although I'm on record as having identified this need long ago, I wouldn't
call it a burning need today. We do, however, have a burning need for teachers
who understand that an encyclopedia is a starting point, and not the finish line,
in any student work.
Go to: Don't Bogart that Info