Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Source

The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Source is an idea for a project, proposed by Richard M. Stallman.

In his essay and announcement[1], Stallman exposes the principles of the project:

• the encyclopedia will not have a central publisher "An encyclopedia located everywhere"
• teachers and students are to be involved in the project
• the encyclopedia will include specialistic topics
• the contents of the encyclopedia will be free, protected by copyleft licenses
• there will be no central control
• peer reviews and endorsements of contents will be encouraged
• catalogation of the contents of the encyclopedia will be a secondary objective (the primary objective being the writing and distribution of the contents)
• links to non free material that should rather be in the encyclopedia will be discouraged

Free encyclopedias

There are a number of collaborative projects claiming to be free encyclopedias. Collectively, they could be regarded as an approximation of the original idea by Stallman.

• Wikipedia: a large, collaboratively edited encyclopedia. Currently a privately controlled project, with an hierachical social structure.
• Anarchopedia: a project with similar goals to Wikipedia, but without a central control or authority.
• Demopedia
• ...