''MNopedia: The Minnesota Encyclopedia'' is a free

English-language English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the is ...

encyclopedia project from the

Minnesota Historical Society The Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS) is a nonprofit educational and cultural institution dedicated to preserving the history of the U.S. state of Minnesota. It was founded by the territorial legislature in 1849, almost a decade before statehoo ...

. Funded through a Legacy Amendment Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund grant, it is the first

online encyclopedia An online encyclopedia, also called an Internet encyclopedia, or a digital encyclopedia, is an encyclopedia accessible through the internet. Examples include Wikipedia and ''Encyclopædia Britannica''. Digitization of old content In January 199 ...

about

Minnesota Minnesota () is a state in the upper midwestern region of the United States. It is the 12th largest U.S. state in area and the 22nd most populous, with over 5.75 million residents. Minnesota is home to western prairies, now given over to ...

, a "resource for reliable information about significant people, places, events, and things in Minnesota history". Approved by Minnesotans on November 4, 2008, planning took place in 2010, the site was built in 2011 and was online on August 15; initial funding for 2010 and 2011 was $215,000. Many of the articles produced by the encyclopedia are licensed under a

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyrics ...

as are some of its multimedia files. The Minnesota Historical Society had previously planned to produce a print encyclopedia, but opted for an online site for the sake of affordability and interactivity. MNHS paid history scholars including Rhoda Gilman and Annette Atkins to compose essays for the site and the historical society also awards grants for the creation of entries on select topics. MNopedia is queryable via

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. Online newspaper ''

MinnPost ''MinnPost'' is a nonprofit online newspaper in Minneapolis, founded in 2007, with a focus on Minnesota news. Funding ''MinnPosts initial funding of $850,000 came from four families: John and Sage Cowles, Lee Lynch and Terry Saario, Joel and ...

'' publishes entries from MNopedia on a weekly basis as well as publishing bimonthly news articles that are later developed into entries for MNopedia. Linda Cameron is the Project Manager. The article on the Wealthy Apple is a staff and internet favorite; under CC-By-SA attribution it was imported from MNopedia into

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...

in 2012.

References

External links

Official website
{{Portal, Internet, United States Internet properties established in 2006 Online encyclopedias Minnesota Historical Society 21st-century encyclopedias Encyclopedias of U.S. states American online encyclopedias