Watch out Wikipedia, here comes Britannica 2.0
Stephen Hutcheon
January 22, 2009 - 2:37PM
In a move to take on Wikipedia, the Encyclopedia Britannica is inviting the hoi polloi to edit, enhance and contribute to its online version.
New features enabling the inclusion of this user-generated content will be rolled out on the encyclopedia's website over the next 24 hours, Britannica's president, Jorge Cauz, said in an interview today.
He also used the opportunity to take a swipe at Britannica's upstart nemesis and Google for helping to promote Wikipedia via its search rankings.
"If I were to be the CEO of Google or the founders of Google I would be very [displeased] that the best search engine in the world continues to provide as a first link, Wikipedia," he said."Is this the best they can do? Is this the best that [their] algorithm can do?"
Mr Cauz, who is visiting Australia, said the changes were the first in a series of enhancements to the britannica.com website designed to encourage more community input to the 241-year-old institution and, in doing so, to take on Wikipedia in the all important search engine rankings.
"What we are trying to do is shifting ... to a much more proactive role for the user and reader where the reader is not only going to learn from reading the article but by modifying the article and - importantly - by maybe creating his own content or her own content," he said.
Mr Cauz said that any changes or additions made to Britannica entries online would have to be vetted by one of the company's staff or freelance editors before the changes were reflected on the live site.
He said the encyclopedia had set a benchmark of a 20-minute turnaround to update the site with user-submitted edits to existing articles, which are written by the encyclopedia's paid expert contributors.
Many of those changes will eventually appear in the printed version of the encyclopedia, which is published every two years.
In addition to the community editing features, Britannica.com will enable approved users to add their own creative input which will sit beside the authorised articles.
Wikipedia, which ranks among the world's top-10 most visited websites, is maintained by volunteers from all over the world and anyone with an internet connection can create and edit articles and publish them on the site.
Would-be editors on the Britannica site will have to register using their real names and addresses before they are allowed to modify or write their own articles.
Mr Cauz characterised Wikipedia as containing "plenty of cracks on it in terms of the quality".
"It's very uneven, the facts are not always correct, the model contains a lot of pitfalls."
Damning his competitor with faint praise, he said a big problem was that many users considered Wikipedia to be "fine" or "good enough".
"What is really unfortunate is that when it comes to knowledge - which is really what makes humans evolve or not evolve into the future - we tend to be non-discriminating. And that's really the troublesome thing."
Asked if he looks at Wikipedia, he said he spent several hours a day online.
"I think it would be impossible not to look at Wikipedia when one goes to Google. It's the most symbiotic relationship happening out there," he said.
"It's very much used by many people because it covers many topics and it's the No.1 search result on Google. It's not necessarily that people go to Wikipedia."
(Google's PageRank search algorithm is designed to look for the most relevant and cited web page and often that happens to be a Wikipedia entry).
Encyclopedia Britannica was first published in 1768 - two years before Captain James Cook's discovery of Australia. Founded in 1994, the Britannica.com's database contains articles comprising more than 46 million words - not counting other forms of media content.
Founded in 2001, Wikipedia is now available in more than 250 languages and attracts about 700 million visitors annually.
The English edition alone contains nearly 2.7 million articles.
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