Not directly about WP, but this will probably be of interest to many here.

Two blog entries from yesterday at britannica.com:

• Collaboration and the Voices of Experts
• Britannica’s New Site: More Participation, Collaboration from Experts and Readers

Britannica online is setting up a collaborative editing interface. Still in its beta stage, but it is clear that they intend to do things differently to WP. To summarise the above two posts, here are some of their planned new features:

• Editors will contribute with their real names.
• "Collaborative but not democratic": contributions from newbies will be considered, but not automatically given the same weight as established experts.
• Judgement of experts in articles will be appreciated instead of a blanket WP:NOR rule.
• All contributions to be checked by editorial staff prior to publication.
• Britannica will maintain responsibility as publishers for what is presented.
• Reward/Incentive system for contributors (details not given)
• Editing interface looks a lot more user-friendly and powerful than the WP interface.

Personally, I'm intrigued and rather impressed by this. But what do you think? Is Britannica on the right track here? Have they taken the various failings of the WP model and come up with a better solution? Is this an attempt to poach good WP contributors? Or is it just an act of desperation to stem the flow of readers from established encyclopedias to WP?

I don't see this as radically different in principle from say Scholarpedia or Citizendium. However, obviously the Britannica brand gives it enormous cachet.

Having signed up for a 7-day "free trial" of Britannica.com, my primary concern for their future competitiveness with Wikipedia is the $69.95 annual fee for full access, versus Wikipedia's "your soul" in exchange for access. I believe 99% of Internet users would sell their soul before dumping $69.95 on a Britannica product that appears to have about 10% of the articles Wikipedia has.

I would like to generate some comparative analysis on the quality of Britannica versus Wikipedia, which the Nature news team so thoroughly and unprofessionally botched. Thus, I've started to compile a random, 10-article set of duplicative articles here:

http://www.wikipediareview.com/Wikipedia_versus_...edia_Britannica

So far, only 2 articles have "matched" out of 21 random Wikipedia articles. That says two things:

1. Wikipedia has a lot of garbage articles about unencyclopedic things.
2. Britannica can't possibly keep up with the lesser-notable but still encyclopedic things that Wikipedia can produce.

As an experiment, I also recommended some collaborative changes to the Jimmy Wales article on Britannica -- essentially reframing him more accurately as the "co-founder" of Wikipedia and including a final sentence about his recent allegations of financial and romantic wrongdoing. Supposedly, a Britannica editor will respond to all meaningful suggestions, but I haven't heard anything back in 24 hours.

Greg

I think its a positive step taken by Britannica to open their content out to the web. I think its absolutely right to get feedback from users about articles that need updating, new articles that should be written, as well as perhaps facts which may have been missed by editors.

The only thing that will cause Wikipedia any frisson of fear is if Britannica makes good on its promise to build an online community which starts to get mindshare (and Google rankings).

Oh yes, yes Greg there are a tremendous number of stupid articles that never should have been written on WP. That's why WP will always lead in the girth stakes.

Where'd my post go? Was it because it was just about spelling?

This is mighty interesting. This may well make or break Britannica, and that mainly depends on the undisclosed incentive provision. Either people will think, "Why should I pay big bucks to be allowed to write what I can just as well write on Wikipedia?" or they will flock there for the recognition and to escape the chaos that is Wikipedia.

If it does work, I think it'll quickly trump Citizendium, which has grown slowly because (in my opinion), when people work for free they don't want their merits to be judged. However, if there is a reward on top of the recognition of The Big Name in encyclopedias, it could get very popular.

It'll be interesting to see what kind of enemies Britannica makes if it takes off. On WP a big problem is the din that comes from the fringe theory and crank factions, and that's in an arena where they get relatively high sympathy if they play their cards right. Britannica will no doubt take a zero tolerance approach, which could upset all the cranks hoping to get the theories they submit published (particularly if NOR doesn't strictly apply). Could be a lot of people crying censorship. britannica-watch.com is still available

I think Britannica has the right idea, experts writing the main content which is then supplemented with content produced by amateurs. This is opposed to:

Wikipedia: amateurs only
Citizenpedia: mostly semi-experts
Scholarpedia: experts only

A successful online encyclopaedia needs to appropriately incorporate the work of the amateurs. Amateurs are capable of producing a greater volume of content then the experts ever can.

Right Wing American Objectivists and Ayn Rand cult worshipers perhaps?


That'll be Jimbo Wales, Erik Moeller and co you are talking about? Nowhere shelters more fringe theorists and lunatic cranks than Wikipedia's core.

If Britannica sets itself up in such a way that vandalism isn't encouraged the way it is on Wikipedia and people who would normally be editing aren't forced to waste countless hours of their time reverting and blocking it for barnstars and pats on the back, it will definitely be a better website than Wikipedia is. The way Wikipedia is now, it is more like a massively multiplayer online role-playing game than an encyclopedia. Britannica may never have as many tiny articles on subjects no one cares about as Wikipedia does, but something tells me that its core articles will be more up to par and I won't have to worry about reading an article and finding "John is ghey" plastered all over the page or dates purposely changed to incorrect ones. Quality beats quantity any day in my book.

Then stop trying to organize the city dump into neat piles. Its not your responsibility and you're wasting your life fretting about it.

Britannica should post the names of the editors whose contributions have been allowed in the article. That way, the contributor can put it on their resume or some other list of accomplishments. The Britannica name still has some prestige. That would help motivate amateurs to make productive suggestions and contributions.

Bingo!

Please, please someone out me as a contributor to Encyclopedia Britannica!

Bleh. We can fix that attitude with nothing more than a little testosterone.

Yups! Heard it in the grape-vine that you are a "closet-Encyclopedia-Britannica-editor". How appalling, so hard to live with, wow! Wish you the best in any case. You could also use shades. Woody Allen would make a great parody on the situation, probably false nose too.

It seems to me that this is Britannica's way of acknowledging that its model is beaten and outmoded. Perhaps those who stridently argue for the superiority of a Britannica-type model should reflect more on what that means.

Genetic recombination is needed. Hybridization of pieces of outmoded or unused ideas. There is no major invention in history where one person or even one group got it completely right the first time, and their competitors came in second in all ways. Successful products steal pieces from all precursors. Even Einstein never would have made it from special to general relativity without inputs from Minkowski, old work by Reimann, and a lot of help from friends who knew more geometry. And it didn't happen overnight, either (it took Einstein a decade of off and on work).

Nobody's arguing for the pure Britannica model-- there aren't enough eyes on it. If you want to fight a war like (again) the UK fought WW II, it takes everybody. Doing everything. Everybody has a job, and does it according to their talents. No, this does not mean you let 12 year-olds command the Allied expeditionary force for a few minutes, every so often (the WP model). No it doesn't mean you have the country sit on its butt while it pays to send a bunch of professional soldiers to do all the fighting (England would have been overrun).

What the failing Britannica and the not-so-horrible Wikipedia means is that there far more parts of an encyclopedia capable of being produced by "non-experts" than we ever imagined. Imagined in the days before anybody actually produced an encylopedia edited entirely by amateurs, as a donated-time exercise (amateurs in the sense that they're not paid, not that some of them are not professionals of many types). So, that's a lesson. As as for the problems of having people do jobs they weren't intended for, well, we've discussed the shortcomings of Wikipedia in other messages <-- understatement

Think of it this way:

• Knowledge = Bread
• Wikipedia = Rust & Smut
• Britannica = Penicillin

The Sum Of Knowledge (SOK) that's out there today was made by people who knew their stuff and they made their place in the ∑ the old-fashioned way — they earned it. The 2% inspiration notwithstanding, the other 98% is pure perspiration.

Everything of value that goes into Wikipedia is wholly parasitic on that SOK.

But the Wikipedia Wikiparasite is the kind of parasite that kills its host.

Perhaps other species of intellectual flora will be more commensal.

Jon

From the blog article:

I don't see it as an admission of failure by Britannica, because the core philosophy about encyclopedia compilation remains intact.

What changes are editorial methods in the production of yearbook articles (that's what we're talking about) and a paradigm shift to publishing on the Internet (which must be embraced by all of the publishing industry at some stage or other). Newspapers and magazines are facing the same challenges with the Internet.

Wikipedia is not a model of collaboration that EB should even consider, since most of WP's output is destructive and attritional.

EB should create a new genuine collaboration model, not try to ape WP.

Wikipedia will always be there, but if EB gets good advice, WP will in turn face a choice: evolve and adapt or die.

In every decade, recordings of Beethoven works are outsold by some other music or "music", a different sort in every decade. Which, if any, will be remembered in 100 years when Beethoven will still be going strong?

Britannica has been going longer than Beethoven.

Only time will tell. Timeless works are created in every era, and there's no reason to think that there aren't any being created in this one. How many of Beethoven's contemporaries are remembered now?

A few. But those that aren't, however popular they were in their own time like Cherubini and Spohr, just prove my point. Beethoven was the real thing, and very few others were.

Just received this in my e-mail inbox from CorrectionsDeskFeedback@eb.com:



In other words, Wales is now a "cofounder" of Wikipedia, but the Britannica editors declined to take my suggestion that Wales has come under allegations of financial and romantic wrongdoing. Good for them!

Greg