The World Atlas of National Online Encyclopedias


Welcome to WANOE



The World Atlas of National Online Encyclopedias (WANOE) is a database of world's national and universal encyclopedias. There is information about online encyclopedias of Europe, America, Asia, Africa, Australia on this website.

The WANOE is designed to organize information about national online encyclopedias as the in different languages reference sources of general knowledge. To be a useful research tool for encyclopedia studies and encyclopedia publishing is a goal of the WANOE.

Why does the WANOE focus only on online encyclopedias and not include many world known national classic reference encyclopedias with a long history? Today, digital encyclopedias largely have replaced paper compendia of knowledge, contain up-to-date information, so they are relevant and competitive media outlets. The future of the encyclopedia field is the development of online encyclopedias worldwide as politicaly independent platforms that provide the access to authoritative, trustworthy, reliable information for people of different languages and cultures as well as fight against mis- and disinformation. We hope that the World Atlas of National Online Encyclopedias will contribute to such advancement.

Publisher: The Institute of Encyclopedic Research, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

Published in 2022 during the Russian war against Ukraine. The contributors are grateful Armed Forces of Ukraine for providing security to perform this work.


Getting started

The WANOE is a platform with continent-related chapters. On the website, information about online encyclopedias presented in mapping way. This database is not all-complete, as we do not have full information about national / universal digital encyclopedias from absolutely every country.

In chapters, to get the information about an national / universal encyclopedia in a country click a needed area on maps. When you click on a country, you can see the title of an encyclopedia and an active link to its website.

Terms of use

The content of the WANOE is published under a Creative Commons Attribution License International CC-BY. It permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

How to cite

We recommend that you cite (APA):

Zhelezniak, M. & Ishchenko, O. (Eds). (2022-2024). The World Atlas of National Online Encyclopedias. Kyiv: The NASU Institute of Encyclopedic Research. doi: https://doi.org/10.37068/b/wanoe