Britannica surrenders to Wikipedia model

britannicanet.com » Blog Archive » Britannica’s New Site. I think we can post this one under 'it was always going to happen'. According to the britannicanet site Encyclopaedia Britannica is about to launch a new initiative. Expert contributors and readers will be able to supplement the content with their own information. Apparently "the result will be a place with broader and more relevant coverage for information seekers and a welcoming community for scholars, experts, and lay contributors."

The Britannica site will become the hub of a new community of scholars and experts. Not only that - but they have bribes! (Clearly the Microsoft model of getting people to use their engine by means of getting money off products is working.) The blog entry says "To elicit their participation in our new online community of scholars, we will provide our contributors with a reward system and a rich online home that will enable them to promote themselves, their work, and their services; allow them to showcase and publish their various works-in-progress in front of the Britannica audience" Of course, there are differences - at least on the surface. The emphasis seems to be very much along the line of identifying contributors, rather than being anonymous, with a further emphasis on scholars, rather than the average Joe on the street - though how that will work with areas that are not heavy on academia I'm not sure.

You can see this in action over on the new website, which is slowly being phased in. What amused me was that the 'W' word wasn't mentioned anywhere in the posting at all. Nor was it mentioned in the 'Collaboration and the Voices of Experts' article in the Britannica Blog either!

It'll be interesting to see how this offering fares against the Google Knol initiative (though to be honest we've not heard much of that recently), or the Citizendium offering - and there's little media coverage of that recently either.

I think it's a good move on the part of the EB - if it works properly, and at this early stage there's no point speculating - but I just wish that they could have been a teensy little more honest and said that the Wikipedia concept was a good one, which is why they are going in the same direction. We all know that's the case, so why bother to pretend? Maybe the first article that could be edited by a scholar would be on the ostrich?

Comments

[Alan Pascoe]

The Wikipedia comparison is not a good one. Britannica are proposing to identify contributors, which implies that the work of authors will not be edited by others. Britannica are also proposing to reward contributors. Wikipedia does neither of these things. A better comparison would be with Google's Knol.

[Phil Bradley]

Well, until we can actually see something concrete from Knol I think it's difficult to make too many comparisons. However, I'm not comparing it to Wikipedia - I said Wikipedia 'model' - which is to say opening up the content to let other people add information themselves, rather than relying on a single publisher to keep control.