Information, please

There’s more information available online than you can possibly imagine, and

most of it is available for free. There are online encyclopedias and dictionar-

ies, archives of scholarly papers and medical research journals, and even

thousands of entire books you can download for free. Here are just a few

information websites to get you started:

✓ Encyclopedia Britannica (www.britannica.com): The encyclopedia

that your school probably had in its library is now available online (in

expanded and updated form, of course).

✓ Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org): This is a wiki, which means it’s pub-

licly updated. Therefore the information in it isn’t authoritative. It’s a

great place to start for basic facts, though, and the breadth of topic cov-

erage is staggering.

✓ Dictionary.com (www.dictionary.com): Your one-stop shop for set-

tling arguments over a word’s definition.

✓ Oxford English Dictionary (www.oed.com): If the dictionary argument

ends with one person saying “Yeah, well that’s not what it used to mean,”

you can settle that argument with the OED, which provides historical

meanings for the last thousand years for more than 600,000 words.

✓ Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org): When books go out of copy-

right, they become public domain, and many of them become available

here, in this library of over 45,000 ebooks, available in plain text, EPUB,

or Kindle format.