Letter from the Encyclopedist

One Year Later...

I can hardly believe it, but I could hardly deny the facts: we launched the Encyclopedia one year ago, on June 30th 2002. How time flies by! During that time the Encyclopedia has seen many changes, all of them slow and gradual so you may not have noticed when they happened.

The most important of those gradual changes is without a doubt the quantity of information found in the Encyclopedia. Over the course of a year, approximately 68,000 pieces of information (staff, cast, companies, anime stats) have been submitted to the Encyclopedia. A big THANK YOU to all the contributors, we couldn't have done it without you. And a special nod to areaseven who, in the past 4 months alone, is responsible for over 8000 of those items. Strength can be found in numbers, and this is the strength of the Encyclopedia. No other website can boast the sheer volume of data we have acquired in one year. And while some monothematic websites have a greater amount of one type of info (Anime Check-list has more titles, Hitoshi Doi has more seiyuu), given the rate at which informations are being submitted... I believe when we celebrate the 2nd birthday we will truly have become your one-stop destination for anime information.

Other gradual changes came in the form of various small upgrades and new features. Even though I didn't announce them as I was supposed to do through this letter, there have been several small improvements like:

the ability to add links for fansites

a section for companies

a section for events (anime conventions)

the possibility of submitting a picture or plot summary if you're not satisfied with the one we currently have

some friendly competition in the contributors page, in the form of a top 3 contributors for every month

for each anime/manga/person, there are now links to the news articles that mention them

the possibility of adding staff and cast using kanji names and staff tasks (if the kanji name is found in the database, it is automatically replaced by the romaji equivalent)

a picture for an anime doesn't have to be pre-sized to 200x200 (the encyclopedia will take care of it)

start/end dates for series have been replaced with a simple "vintage" that allows to add TV runs for other countries

the ability to add episode lists (witness the most complete Pokemon episode list on the net)

the ability to add the same title for two or more anime, as long as these anime are of different types (TV, OAV, manga, etc...)

the ability to add different people with the same name, like Osamu Tezuka and Osamu Tezuka (if you know of other people with identical names, let us know)

And, to celebrate this one-year birthday, I just added a little feature to compare the staff & cast of anime titles and to compare the anime credits of people. In this way, one little feature at a time, one improvement at at time, the functionality of the Encyclopedia keeps expanding.

That isn't an exhaustive list of all the improvements - there were plenty of minor changes here and there - but there's still a lot left to do. The Encyclopedia currently contains 2202 anime titles; that may seem like a lot but we're still missing over two thousands! Also, many people and companies have been entered using slightly different spellings, creating duplicates that need to be merged. And we may yet add a section for profiles of anime characters. There's a lot of work still ahead of us but the future is open, guided in large part by the suggestions that our users make. And if the past twelve months are any indication, the Encyclopedia has a splendid future ahead of it.