Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
A Dynamic Reference Work∗†∗Uri Nodelman , Colin Allen , Edward N. Zalta†Stanford University and Texas A&M University
nodelman@stanford.edu, colin-allen@tamu.edu, zalta@stanford.edu∗The recent work of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy project <http://plato.stanford.edu/> has been focusedon fostering and managing the growth of a dynamic reference work. Our particular project is to produce an authoritative and comprehensive dynamic reference work devoted
to the academic discipline of philosophy that will be kept
up to date dynamically so as to remain useful to those inacademia and the general public.
Our concept of a dynamic reference work is defined ina way which distinguishes it from other online publishingprojects, namely: (1) it is published in a continuously revisable electronic medium, (2) it offers a comprehensive setof entries on topics in a target discipline, (3) it provides theauthors of the entries with electronic access to the reference
work’s central web server, so that they can remotely edit
and update private copies of their entries and submit themfor publication according to a regular update schedule andat any other time it becomes necessary to revise, (4) it maintains quality by way of a distinguished Board of Editors, themembers of which commission the entries and referee boththe initial versions of the entries and subsequent substantive modifications, prior to publication on the web, and (5)it creates, and makes publicly available, archives of the entries on at least a quarterly basis (i.e., these contain fixedversions of the entries, which can be cited in scholarly publications). A dynamic reference work based on this model
constantly evolves and becomes responsive to new research.
Thus, a dynamic reference work is not merely a revisable
work or one that is published online. Successful implementation of the dynamic aspects of this definition depend upon
the ease with which the authors, subject editors, and theprincipal editor have access to the tools and informationthat allow entries at all stages of the work flow to be managed asynchronously. In such an environment, each entry
has its own deadlines and it is necessary to track electronically the location of every entry in the work flow and provide
automated reminders to individuals with work pending.
Over the past two years, the number of authors attached
to our project has grown considerably – from about 350 to600. As a result, the number of entries which are being submitted, reviewed, published, and updated at any given moment has grown rapidly. In the past year, the average rate
at which we publish new entries rose from approximately 2entries per month to 10 entries per month.
In this context of rapid development, our work on manCopyright is held by the author/owner.
JCDL’02, July 14-18, 2002, Portland, Oregon, USAACM 0-89791-88-6/97/05.

aging and fostering growth means: (1) working to insurethat the asynchronous publication schedule for the entries
is met even though there is no pre-determined publication
date, (2) working to enable a small support staff on a small
budget (compared to traditional reference work publishing)
to manage the project in the face of rapid growth, and (3)working to help our users more quickly access and navigate
the growing reference work as more entries become available.
We will demonstrate how our password-protected web interfaces, back-end processing system, and new front-end features, work together to facilitate the collaborative effort ofcreating and managing the dynamic reference work. We will
highlight the newest parts of the system which are centeredon growth. These include: (1) enhanced automation of email
reminders that is sensitive to author and board member responsiveness and (2) an automated link-rot detection andnotification system. Also, new and improved ways to navigate the encyclopedia including: (1) an automated dynamic
re-cross-referencing system which enables users to more easily navigate the encyclopedia thematically, (2) a dynamicallygenerated “What’s New” page that summarizes the changes
for updated entries, and (3) a system which allows users toview the changes in the updated versions of entries.
When compared to other online publishing efforts of similar scale, we face some unique technical challenges. For
example, most serial publications do not require re-crossreferencing of their documents as new articles are published.
People who want to navigate thematically do so throughsearches which can return irrelevant results that are easilyignored. Because our documents contain links to the related entries, we must maintain those links properly – lest
the irrelevant links become part of the document itself.
A more in-depth discussion of the concept of a dynamic
reference work, our implementation of it, and a discussionof the current state and future of our project is available
in our recent paper ‘The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: A Developed Dynamic Reference Work’, by the present
authors, forthcoming Metaphilosophy; to be reprinted in CyberPhilosophy: The Intersection of Philosophy and Computing, James H. Moor and Terrell Ward Bynum, (eds.), Oxford: lackwell, 2002. It may be found in PDF at the URL:
<http://plato.stanford.edu/sep.pdf>
The technical specifications of our system are describedin the project description of our NSF/DLI-2 proposal (accepted in August 2000), which may be found at the URL:
<http://plato.stanford.edu/ editors/NSF/project-description.pdf>
This research is supported by NSF grant #IIS-9981549.