e website is available for a monthly or annual. In 2009,
Britannica.com opened its website to external contributors, with
registration required to write and edit articles.

December 1999 > Two French-language encyclopedias on the web

Launched by Editions Atlas in December 1999, Webencyclo was the first
main French-language online encyclopedia available for free on the web.
It was possible to search the encyclopedia by keyword, topic, media
(maps, links, photos and illustrations) and ideas. A call for papers
invited specialists in a given topic to become external contributors
and submit articles in a section called Webencyclo Contributif. Later
on, a free registration was required to use the online encyclopedia.
Launched at the same time, the website of Encyclopedia Universalis
included 28,000 articles by 4,000 contributors. The website has been
available for an annual fee, and a number of articles are also
available for free.

January 2000 > The Million Book Project

Launched in January 2000 by the Carnegie Mellon University
(Pennsylvania, United States), the Million Book Project, also called
the Universal Library or Universal Digital Library (UDL), aimed to
digitize one million books in a number of languages, including in India
and China. The project was completed in 2007. One million books have
been available on the university website, as image files in DjVu and
TIFF formats, with three mirror sites in northern China, southern China
and India. The project may have inspired the Open Content Alliance
(OCA), a universal public digital library launched by the Internet
Archive in October 2005.

February 2000 > yourDictionary.com

Robert Beard, a professor at Bucknell University (USA), first created
in 1995 A Web of Online Dictionaries as a directory of online
dictionaries (with 800 links in fall 1998) and other linguistic
resources such as thesauri, vocabularies, glossaries, grammars, and
language textbooks. Robert Beard co-founded then yourDictionary.com,
that included its previous website and went online in February 2000.
yourDictionary.com included 1,800 dictionaries in 250 languages in
September 2003, and 2,500 dictionaries in 300 languages in April 2007.
As a tool for all languages without exception, the portal also offers
the Endangered Language Repository.

March 2000 > The Oxford English Dictionary online

The online version (for a subscription fee) of the Oxford English
Dictionary (OED), a dictionary in