Can it really be? Encyclopaedia Britannica will soon be launching a new initiative to promote greater participation by both expert contributors and readers.

Both groups will be invited to play a larger role in expanding, improving, and maintaining the information on the Web under the Encyclopaedia Britannica name. They will also be sharing content they create with other visitors.

This comes as a surprise after years of antagonism between Wikepedia and Britannica where the the main conflict has been on the subject of the value of the contributions of amateurs. But is this really such a quantum leap as Britannica will have us beleive?

More collaboration

According to Britannica, the new web site will reveal a complete redesign, editing tools, and incentive programs.

On the Britannica blog, it says:

These efforts not only will improve the scope and quality of Encyclopaedia Britannica, but they’ll also allow expert contributors and readers to supplement this content with their own. 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.

Main features

• The Britannica Online site will become the hub of a new online community that will welcome and engage thousands of scholars and experts with whom Britannica already has relationships.
• Readers are invited into an online community where they can work and publish at Britannica’s site under their own names.
• The material created by contributors and the user community, which each member will control and be credited for, will be published alongside the encyclopedia.

In for a surprise?

In a comment on the new and collaborative online version of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Britannica’s president Jorge Cauz says that collaboration with their readers is not something new to them:

At Britannica, [...] we’ve been working for 240 years at creating, documenting and sharing knowledge through a process in which thousands of expert contributors and dozens if not hundreds of editors work daily to produce factually correct, objective, well written, and up-to-date encyclopedia entries. Our readers have also played an important part in this process. For many years we have received and answered letters in which they have shared their points of view with us or suggested specific improvements.

Wake up and smell the coffee, Mr. Cauz! Mass online collaboration is fundamentally different from sending and receiving letters. If your new site is truly collaborative in nature, you may experience an exponential growth of feedback and contribution. The new amateur contributors won’t simply contribute to the site, they will change it’s very fabric.

However, there is one part of the strategy that may lead to failure: At the moment only the concise version of Britannica is open to the public. The main bulk of its over 120,000 articles are available for a fee-based subscription only.

The relationship between this closed version and the new community driven part is unclear.

The public beta has links to a seven day free trial of the paid version of Britannica, which clearly indicates that the encyclopedia plans to keep the main sections closed to non-paying users.

In our opinion, this undermines the whole purpose of turning Britannica into a social web site.

Why should anyone want to write content for a site that may already have a lot of similar analysis behind closed doors, especially when you can write for a free, open, encyclopdia of a relatively high quality (Wikipedia)?

Moreover, who would want to use a combination of Britannica’s slim Concise encyclopedia with user generated content, when Wikipedia is so much broader in scope? We don’t think this strategy will work.

If Britannica decides to turn the whole of Britannica into a free, advertising funded site, they may have a winner that could even compete successfully with Wikipedia. The complete Britannica is one amazing source of information!

More info

• Britannica’s explanation of the new collaborative features.
• Further explanation about collaboration and the voice of experts.
• Comments by Encyclopaedia Britannica’s president Jorge Cauz.
• Link to the beta version of the collaborative version.

See also our article Are there free online encyclopedias that can compete with the Wikipedia?