Great Encyclopedia of Cyril and Methodius

The basis of the BECM was the materials of the Great Encyclopedic Dictionary , published by the Great Russian Encyclopedia publishing house in 1996 . It has been updated and expanded. Moreover, most of the articles have been edited and expanded.

The sixteenth edition of the 2013 BECM includes more than 95 thousand encyclopedic and reference articles, six general and special dictionaries, more than 46 thousand multimedia illustrations; In addition, the BECM includes animated maps, interactive diagrams and tables, three-dimensional models, audio and video clips, illustrated interactive tapes, and multimedia panoramas.

Among the authors of the encyclopedia are some well-known Russian scientists and publicists: academicians S. S. Averintsev , M. L. Gasparov , A. A. Fursenko , S. O. Schmidt , V. L. Yanin , corresponding members V. I. Ritus B. B. Florya , as well as Yu. M. Brook, M. I. Kaganov , Yu. N. Vavilov , Yu. V. Gaponov , A. M. Zverev , S. G. Bocharov , V. I. Grigoriev , A.F. Gryaznov, A. B. Kamensky , L.P. Krysin, and others.

BECM has repeatedly received awards from the PC World magazine as the “Best Product of the Year” in the Encyclopedia nomination ^[4] .

BECM is criticized for the following reasons ^[5] :

• high price;
• large size (BECM-2011 does not fit on a two-layer DVD );
• errors and shortcomings of the shell program (inconvenience of use, high consumption of computer resources, problems with sound and video playback, unstable operation);
• illustration:
  • some articles are not illustrated despite the fact that BECM positions itself as a multimedia publication;
  • part of the illustrations was borrowed from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, Wikipedia, and numerous free photobanks indicating the copyright “Cyril and Methodius”;
  • some illustrations are signed incorrectly and have no relation to the articles in which they are inserted;
  • illogical arrangement of cards or thematic tapes by articles;
• articles:
  • BECM has a lot of media applications, but there is little information that could be used for its education. Some articles contain several lines (little information) that are characteristic of encyclopedic dictionaries, and not of encyclopedias. More than half of the articles are copied from the Great Encyclopedic Dictionary and contain one or two paragraphs. Articles contain few cross-references. Some articles contain only a link to the main article;
  • There are grammatical, syntactic, semantic and factual (false data) errors. Hyperlinks may lead to incorrect articles. Some words are written together (spaces are missing);
  • there are no articles present in other thematic encyclopedias “Cyril and Methodius” (in particular, there are no articles on the following topics: cooking, cinema, cars, military equipment, computer, health, sports, music, professions, etiquette (folk traditions) and others) ;
• regular reprints of BECM differ little from each other (the content of articles improves little, the number of new articles is small).

Approved ^[5] that:

• more than half of the articles in BECM 2011 have not changed since 1996;
• simultaneous work is underway on 16 thematic encyclopedias (Cinema Encyclopedia (2003), PC Encyclopedia, Children's Encyclopedia, Culinary Encyclopedia, Automobile Encyclopedia (2004), and the military technology encyclopedia (1998), “The Encyclopedia of Popular Music” (2008) and others), among which BECM does not appear as a separate software product, but as an advertisement for other multimedia encyclopedias;
• articles published in the BECM lose in quality even to similar articles from thematic encyclopedias.

At the same time, the advantages of BECM are noted ^[5] :

• ease of search in the shell program;
• the presence of thematic tapes (historical chronicles);
• the availability of texts, laws and works of scientific and fiction (for example, poetry).

• Mega-Encyclopedia of Cyril and Methodius .