History of the Encyclopædia Britannica the criteria by which the articles were sorted were not obvious even to scholars, despite Dr. Adler's claims that the sorting followed naturally from the "Propædia's" outline of all knowledge. In 1985, the "Britannica" responded to reader requests by restoring the index as a two-volume set. The number of topics indexed by the "Britannica" has fluctuated from 500,000 (1985, the same as in 1954) to 400,000 (1989,1991) to 700,000 in the current 2007 print version. Presumably, this recent increase reflects the introduction of efficient electronic indexing, since the size of the encyclopedia has remained nearly constant at approximately 40 million
Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition reputation of the "Britannica" and because it is now in the public domain and has been made available on the Internet. It has been used as a source by many modern projects, including Wikipedia and the "Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia". The Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia is the eleventh edition of the "Encyclopædia Britannica", renamed to address Britannica's trademark concerns. Project Gutenberg's offerings are summarized below in the External links section and include text and graphics. , Distributed Proofreaders are working on producing a complete electronic edition of the 1911 "Encyclopædia Britannica". The preceding links adopt the spellings used in the target. Encyclopædia