Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential

Databases, entries, and interlinks

The Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential is made up from data gathered from many sources. Those data are grouped into various databases which constitute the backbone of the Encyclopedia. The databases are searchable; query results may be seen as lists or as various visualizations.

List of databases

World Problems – Issues is a database with 56,000+ entries and 276,000+ links.

• Basic universal problems include danger, lack of information, social injustice, war, environmental degradation.
• Cross-sectoral problems include animal suffering, irresponsible nationalism, soil degradation.
• Detailed problems include detention of mothers, epidemics, white-collar crime.
• Emanations of other problems include terrorism targeted against tourists, injustice of mass trials, threatened species of Caudata.
• Fuzzy exceptional problems include blaming victims, pacifism, unconstrained free trade.
• Very specific problems include blue baby, tomato mottle virus, costly uniforms.
• Problems under consideration include feminist backlash, mudslide.
• Suspect problems include threatened species of Zapus hudsonius preblei, uncommitted volunteer workers.

Global Strategies – Solutions is a database with 32,000+ entries and 284,000 links.

• Abstract fundamental strategies include compromising, transcending, providing.
• Basic universal strategies include eliminating discrimination, combating desertification, reducing unemployment.
• Cross-sectoral strategies include orienting economic policy toward social need, managing crises.
• Detailed strategies include establishing national government NGO departments, using psychological warfare.
• Emanations of other strategies include lifting restrictions on human rights advocacy, reviewing provisions of the UN Charter.
• Exceptional strategies include begging, rechanneling expenditures on defence, advocating nihilism.
• Very specific strategies include working with young people, undertaking public works.
• Unconfirmed strategies include abolishing zoos, ventilating air through buildings.
• Provisional strategies include developing chest radiology, preserving internal political borders.
• Strategy polarities include deepening-shallowing, intuiting-reasoning, supporting-opposing.
• Strategy roles include advisor, traitor, confessor.
• Strategy types or complexes include communication, judgement, time.

Human Values is a database with 3,200+ entries and 119,000+ links.

• Constructive values include peace, harmony, beauty.
• Destructive values include conflict, depravity, ugliness.
• Value polarities include agreement-disagreement, freedom-restraint, pleasure-displeasure.
• Value clusters include feeling complex, interaction complex, communication complex.

Human Development is a database with 4,800+ entries and 19,000+ links.

• Concepts of human development include vocational training, benevolence, emancipation of the self.
• Modes of awareness include compassion, sense of shame, conviction, sense of humor.

Patterns and Metaphors is a database with 1,200+ entries and 4,500+ links.

• Communication: Forms of presentation include animation, statistical indicators, prophecy.
• Metaphors include ball games, sexual intercourse, personification, stick and carrot processes.
• Patterns (Christopher Alexander) include encirclement, internal connectedness between domains, partially isolated contexts.
• Symbols include birds, food-related objects, sacred calendar.
• Transformative conferencing includes aggressive participant type, lecture, team roles.
• Transformative metaphors (I Ching) include creativity, receptivity, inexperience.

Bibliography (issues) is a database with 16,000+ entries and 24,000+ links.

Integrative Concepts is a database with 600+ entries and no links. Entries include design, meta-language, science policy.

Network Visualizations is a database featuring a collection of documents added from 2001 to the present.

Entries and links

The Encyclopedia online databases consist of over 100,000 entries (also called profiles) and 700,000 links. An entry, for instance War, may include the following elements:
1) name, alternative names, nature or definition, background or context, incidence (for problems) or implementation (for strategies), claim of importance, counter-claim, quotations or aphorisms (for values);
2) links to the same database entries that are more general (broader), more specific (narrower), related (in some as yet unspecified manner), preceding (aggravating or reducing problems, constraining or facilitating strategies, prior modes of awareness), following (aggravated or reduced problems, constrained or facilitated strategies, subsequent modes of awareness);
3) cross-reference links, mainly between entries in the Problems, Strategies, Values, and Development databases;
4) links to entries in other UIA databases, mainly the International Organizations database;
5) reference links to entries in the Bibliography (issues) database;
6) links to relevant websites.

Contributors

The project was originally conceived in 1972 by James Wellesley-Wesley, who provided financial support through the foundation Mankind 2000, and Anthony Judge, by whom the work was orchestrated.

Work on the first edition started with funds from Mankind 2000, matching those of the UIA. The publisher Klaus Saur, of Munich, provided funds, in conjunction with those from the UIA, for work on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th editions. Seed funding for the third volume of the 4th edition was also provided on behalf of Mankind 2000. In the nineties, seed funding was provided, again on behalf of Mankind 2000, for computer equipment which subsequently allowed the UIA to develop a large website and make progressively available for free the Encyclopedia databases as from the 1994–1995 edition. In turn, this proven knowledge management capacity enabled the UIA, on the initiative of Nadia McLaren, a consultant ecologist who has been a primary editor for the Encyclopedia, to successfully instigate two multi-partner projects funded by the European Union, with matching funds from the UIA. The work done through those two projects, Ecolynx: Information Context for Biodiversity Conservation (mainly) and Interactive Health Ecology Access Links, eventually resulted in what amounted to a fifth, web-based, edition of the Encyclopedia in 2000. In their own ways, two other persons in particular effectively supported the project over the years: Robert Jungk of Mankind 2000, and Christian de Laet of the UIA.

The Encyclopedia was the fruit of a continuing processing of documents gathered from many of the thousands of the international organizations profiled in the Yearbook of International Organizations. Many such bodies regularly produce a wide range of material on the areas of their concern, many regularly send documents to the UIA, and many, when requested more specifically, supplied documents for the Encyclopedia. The following organizations provided documents in the greatest quantity: FAO, ILO, UNICEF, UNESCO, UNCTD, WHO, Commonwealth Secretariat, Council of Europe, OECD, World Bank group. Furthermore, the United Nations Library in Geneva facilitated access to other material over two decades. The Institute of Cultural Affairs International was contractually associated at one point to the edition and other aspects of the Encyclopedia project. The Goals, Processes and Indicators of Development project (led by Johan Galtung) of the United Nations University, in which Anthony Judge participated on behalf of the UIA between 1978 and 1982, was an experience of learning and research that had a significant impact on the editorial content of the Encyclopedia. Another noticeable influence came from futures studies, with which Judge has long been associated. He reports in Encyclopedia Illusions how the narrow focus of the Club of Rome on a few socio-economic aspects of futures research prompted the much vaster exploration concerning world problems and human potential.

Anthony Judge was the architect and managing editor of the Encyclopedia. He was also the main author of the notes and commentaries. The principal editors over the years have been, for different editions, Jon Jenkins and Maureen Jenkins (who had also worked at the Institute of Cultural Affairs), Owen Victor, Jacqueline Nebel, Nadia McLaren, and Tomáš Fülöpp. There were also enthusiastic editorial contributions from volunteers. All people related to the UIA who worked directly on one or more of the five Encyclopedia editions figure on a list that can be found online under the heading Associates of the Union of Intelligible Associations. This is because in 2005, following disagreement over the partnership contract, Anthony Judge, as Executive Secretary of Mankind 2000, reframed the Encyclopedia as having been a strategic initiative of the Union of Intelligible Associations. Tomáš Fülöpp continued maintaining and improving Encyclopedia databases at the UIA until January 2012.

Editions

The 1st edition, initiated in 1972 and published in 1976, has one volume entitled Yearbook of World Problems and Human Potential, comprising thirteen sections, several of which have not appeared in subsequent editions.

The 2nd edition, initiated in 1983 and published in 1986, has the new definitive title Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential. It is still a single volume (published, this time only, as volume 4 of the Yearbook of International Organizations), but it has a different set of sections, and because it is printed on thin paper with a special world award winning typesetting, the book is equivalent to several normal volumes.

The 3rd edition, initiated in 1988 and published in 1991, has two volumes: World Problems (vol. 1), and Human Potential (vol. 2).

The 4th edition, initiated in 1992 and published in 1994–1995, has three volumes: World Problems (vol. 1), Human Potential – Transformation and Values (vol.2), Actions – Strategies – Solutions (vol. 3). A CD-ROM version, Encyclopedia Plus, is also published.

The online edition, initiated in 1997 and completed in 2000, is freely available. It may be noted that a gigantic "Questions database" was added in 2006, but removed shortly after to reduce server burden. For the future, it can be seen on the UIA website that a participative and interactive process is in place, which might allow eventually, in accordance with the often expressed intentions of the editors, to develop the online Encyclopedia in a continuous manner.

Here is a table showing the number of entries for certain topics in the various editions.

Reviews and criticisms

There has been several reviews of the Encyclopedia. One of the harshest criticisms came from the American Library Association in 1987: "The board considers the Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential a problematic monument to idiosyncrasy, confusion, and obfuscation that certainly is not worth purchasing at any price." Similarly, The Guardian was extremely critical in a review article published in 1992, to which Anthony Judge recently responded via Transcend Media Service on the occasion of the publication in The Wall Street Journal of a page-one sympathetic review of the Encyclopedia initiative, in December 2012. The work itself is keen on presenting, in various places, disclaimers, reservations or warning texts that anticipate criticisms and explain the strengths and weaknesses of its approaches, including the failure to advocate a position, or the sometimes excessive complexity in its methods or language. Most reviews are laudatory, however. Richard Slaughter emphasized that the significance of the work is not its size or the scope of its references, impressive though these are. It is rather in the nature of what has been attempted. The accompanying notes and commentaries, he said, are good enough to be published separately because they contain highly cogent observations on the "global problematique", commentaries on the work of numerous great thinkers from a wide variety of fields, and an impressive array of insights about the epistemology, symbolism, metaphysics, metaphors and linguistic representations of the subject. As far as practice is concerned, the highest commendation perhaps is to be found in the words of Elise Boulding: "Any one of us (...) can actively become a part in the world problem solving process by using this encyclopedia."