•Britannica Looks to Emulate Wikipedia Success With User-Generated ...
Appscout, NY -52 minutes ago
The editors of Encyclopedia Britannica have taken a page out of the undeniable success of Wikipedia with the addition of user-generated content to its ...

View the article

I don't think 20 minutes is very realistic in the long-term. Perhaps in the short, short term. If there is any success at all seen here, without a large staff, that's just unrealistic. The fact that there is a wait will most likely encourage larger edits, which will take longer to verify.

This is interesting. It means continuously available experts. I wonder if people with the needed chops will work in something that almost approaches a help desk like environment? Maybe, it can be hard world after all. Maybe it is a first level of review, with the equivalent of grad students, that permits the edit to go through with further more thoughtful review down the road.

Plus it will doubtlessly spur some new and fresh thinking about content and dispute resolution.

Indeed. This will be interesting to see unfold. If it is successful, I'm very interested to watch the way Britannica deals with the various issues Wikipedia has had to deal with over the years.

First level of review will be legal - very unlikely that Britannica will be looking for a section 230 get out clause.

AF

Greater information available here: http://britannicanet.com/?p=86

Authors retain ownership of their articles, though others can contribute as well. Similar to one of the options on Knol, if I remember correctly.

So Jimbo pushes through flagged revisions hours before Britannica reveals the details of their online collaboration utilizing flagged revisions... the timing is incredible.

today: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7846986.stm

Just as NIH stands for Not Invented Here, you can bet that Britannica won't deal with its coming baptism by fire by asking advice from the people who've already been though the mud and flames at WP.

I mean, on WR we KNOW the major-editors on WP, and the major people who'd had problems there, also. But have we heard anything from anybody at Knol or Britannica? No. They're probably consulting with WMF people!

I'll go further-- you heard this here first: It wouldn't suprise me if they've approached Jimbo (or Moeller) with a consultant's contract. AND he's taken money from them. It's that kind of world.

Plus, it would explain a lot of the timing synchrony oddities. Jimbo's not going to think all this through for free, and we know he's not going to do it for the sake of WP. So my guess is, he was paid to look into it by somebody else, and he did. And decided it didn't suck after all. But he couldn't let them beat him to the punch on his own site, so--- here we are.

Now, let's see how a good ergonomically-sophisiticated engineer would go about this.

First, you do a sample for submitted articles which are awaiting approval, to find out what the characteristics of the set of times between submission and approval of articles is. This list and its stats will be dynamic, but you can do a sample of it statistically every week, or even every day, if you must.

That gives you an expectation curve-- a list of all submitted but yet-unapproved articles and dynamic times (a ticking meter for each) which gives the time since each article has last been submitted for approval, and the time NOW. A statistical look at the "caller on hold wait time" problem, if you want to look at it that way.

Then you break those down, by wait-time, into bins. Quintiles or deciles, or whatever number of reasonbly distinct colors a standard display can support. You do this so that each "delay and waiting bin" has roughly the same number of articles in it (or whatever fraction you choose, but it's constant), and thus the time-range each bin represents, will vary widely.

The first bin (for example) might be anything from 5 seconds to 5 minutes, but the second might be 5 minutes to 30 min or something. Whatever it is, the range of each bin is adjusted by fraction of articles out of the total it holds, so looking at it from less-to-more, is always a look at the line of first-come-first-serve for articles "on hold", no matter how much editorial help you have on any given day, and what the mean or mode times happen to be on that day. So the bin parameters are a relative thing, which correct for amount of help available automatically.

And then you color-code those articles by waiting bin queue, when they show up on a Watch List. Articles which aren't on "wait" or "hold" can be black. Everything else can be a color that varies by where it is in line. A nice cool purple for just approved recently but waiting on a new submission, going to blue for longer wait, to green for longer, to yellow, and finally to orange and red for waiting a hell of a long time (say, for longer than 90% of the other articles that STILL have not approved.

Then, when somebody doing approvals of flagged submissions pulls up their Watch List of articles they're already acquainted with, they see what needs to be done the worst, right off. The colors tell them.

If you like, you can also do something like this for some subset of the whole "waiting evaluation" article pool, so editors can see some subset of articles (got to figure out ways to pair this down) that they've never seen, but again arrayed by need for attention like callers on hold, in a way that is immediately obvious. Some people may actually enjoy getting articles they'd never seen, but that have been waiting a REALLY ong time for parole from the flagged doldrums or "needs looking at" category. Articles shouldn't have to suffer just because they aren't on many people's watch lists. However, articles that are on more watch lists probably should get some special treatment for that, and this system does that.

Milt

Ain't that funny. This news item appears, and among the first people to post comments below it: someone who was tossed out of Wikipedia.....


Lots of good, valid ideas, Milton.

However: What makes you think they'll have the resources and staff to assemble a
system of this complexity?

For all we know, they're being pressured by top management to do it as cheaply as possible.

If they do hire WMF people as consultants, the advice they're likely to get will be
"Let everything go wild! Don't keep statistics or watch lists, Wikipedia doesn't
do any of that, and look how well it worked......"

The BBC article also has a link to an older BBC article.

The economic are daunting too. EB claims to have 4,000 experts. Maybe these are people who consult and write articles and not full time employees. If they are FTEs figuring salary benefits and office overhead at $100,000 would result in an expense of $400,000,000.00. They are selling "full-access" subscription at around $70 per year. I'm not sure what that gives you or what exactly is available for free, but I think it might mean it gives access to the existing 140,000 EB articles. In any event paying off the $400,000,000.00 nut would require 4,700,000 subscriptions.

Now maybe the plan is to continue the paper project to the extent possible, even if that in itself would be a net loss and have the online subscription as an add on. That might work if they can keep institutional paper customers at a fair level. It would be the same expense except for transferring to and maintaining a website.

Will five million people pay $70 a year? I think I will, if only to be able to conveniently compare EB and WP articles.

$400,000,000.00 is an order of magnitude or two beyond WP's budget, even with recent increases, but that makes since to me. It costs real money to responsibly run an on-line encyclopedia.

You got me thinking of a further dimension that might be in the offing. Maybe Britannica will make an offer to Jimbo and the Foundation concerning a "buy-out" of Wikipedia, and Jimbo may also take some shares in Britannica. Wales is still begging for 'funds', and that scenario would suit Jimbo's mendicant situation just dandy!

Great. A real encyclopedia will pay millions to that guy, to get their hands on his vandalism-filled fancruft encyclopedia.

Sadly, I can easily imagine this happening.

(Me? Cynical?.....)