Scholarpedia is a peer-reviewed open-access encyclopedia written and maintained by scholarly experts from around the world. Scholarpedia is inspired by Wikipedia and aims to complement it by providing in-depth scholarly treatments of academic topics.
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Main_Page
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http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Main_Page
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Scholarpedia:Authors
Scholarpedia has certainly improved since the last time I looked about a year ago. It is getting more content.
It seems very spotty. I have read some very good articles in Scholarpedia, but frequently when I search on a topic I find nothing. These holes can be big - for example, the page for Quantum chromodynamics just says :
There is currently no text in this page. You can search for this page title in other pages, or search the related logs.
A similar, but more focused, effort is the "Living Reviews in Relativity" - http://relativity.livingreviews.org/ . This is more like a journal, but with an intention of keeping articles up to date. It is where I go first if I want to know the status of issues in gravity and general relativity. If Scholarpedia could reach anything like that depth in general science issues, it would be a pretty amazing resource, but I don't think it is there now.,
I think it is a good idea, but up to now there are not too much contributions.
Dear Marshall and Rey, I agree, but as we say "Rome wasn't build in a day", and it seems that it takes time to build an open access encyclopedia from scratch, especially with the limitation that the authors have to be the most acknowledged experts in their field. Thanks for your reaction though.
Dear Werner,
I don't understand why you say that, because one has to be invited to write an entry, scholarpedia doesn't deserve the name of encyclopedia. As a matter of fact, all encyclopedias work this way (except the very special case of wikipedia). For instance, in the 13th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica (published 1926), Sigmund Freud wrote "Psychoanalysis" and Albert Einstein wrote "Space-Time". The idea is to do the same with today most acknowledged researchers in their field, except that it would be free for everyone. Isn't it a marvelous idea? (which doesn't mean that it is problem-free)
Regarding citations, I don't see why citing an entry from scholarpedia would be worse than citing any other review paper. I don't talk about wikipedia. Wikipedia is not the scope of my original question.
But I agree that they might be a formatting issue due to the wikitext format. This may evolve in the future though. However, I disagree with the redundancy issue that you raised, as it exists in "classical literature" as well. (Again, I am only concerned by scholarpedia, and not by wikipedia).
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