On Matrindale's "The Reference Desk"

I posted A List of Reference and Educational Sites yesterday, and, without surprise, I quickly learned of another site that has an extraordinarily detailed list of reference materials on the internet, Jim Martindale's The Reference Desk.  I've updated my post include it.

I've noticed, though, that  what my list offers and what Martindale's list offers are substantially different.  For example, I could find no link to nine of the tweleve sites my post identified as the most important, including the current mother of all references, Wikipedia.  There are a lot of other sites I consider important I haven't been able to find there, such as some key federal agency reference sites like EDGAR, the Census, and the National Archives, book and journal sites like Project Gutenberg and SSRN, and some really excellent general information sites like FindLaw and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  That doesn't mean they're not there, by the way; it means I wasn't able to find them, and that's part of the problem.

Martindale's site was started many years ago, and it seems to revel in the sheer number of listings it has.  It looks like a great place to poke around in, like poking around in the stacks of a library.  In fact I plan to go there and do that a lot.  My list was designed for practical purposes, and I pared down my list to about 150 as my goal is to provide ready reference.  Not distinguishing between the highly useful and the less useful makes the important and best stuff less accessible.  But that's not the only valid approach, and martindale's heaps of links have a place.  It is obvious that Martindale's site has been carefully composed and developed over years; it's a musty library but a really nice place to browse.