For years, I’ve been recommending Steve Kropla’s World Electric Guide as the definitive source of information about all things electrical. For the world traveler, it’s indispensable. If you’re planning to visit another country and you want to know what kind of adapter to bring and whether your 110V power supply will work, this is the place to start. There’s even a copiously illustrated guide to electric plugs in use, with a picture of the plug labeled A, B, C and so on, which is keyed to the Electric Power Around the World table, where each country is listed, along with voltage, frequency, and the letter or letters that correspond to the plug type(s) used in that country.
It’s a great site, and it’s been around for a long, long time. Kropla’s copyright notice is dated 1996. The Wayback Machine at the Internet Archives has a record of crawling the page in 1998, and there’s an archived copy of the page from early 1999 that contains much of the same basic information you’ll find there today.
So imagine my surprise when I visit Charles Arthur’s site today and see a pointer to a completely different site called Electricity Around the World. It’s part of a larger site called World Standards, run by Conrad H. McGregor. The Wayback Machine first took notice of this page in early 2003. It uses very similar illustrations and a strikingly similar table (lacking many of the details in Kropla’s version) to make some of the same points.
I don’t think this is plagiarism. The writing at both sites is sufficiently different, and it’s entirely plausible that McGregor used the same source material to build his site from scratch. Given the popularity of Kropla’s site, though, it is puzzling that the other site, which started many years later, doesn’t link to it or list any other sources. To Kropla’s credit, he lists many of his sources, and he has updated the signature table at the site with personal observations that really enhance its value. When you dig into both sites, you can see that Kropla.com has much more detail, although either site will do the trick if you’re simply trying to answer the question of which plug adaptor to take to Australia or Zambia.
My contribution here is to review the two sites and recommend one over the other. Kropla.com still gets the nod.
Ed Bott 