It wasn’t that long ago the people behind Encyclopedia Britannica turned an academic nose up toward Wikipedia for its populist ways. That may have been a tad premature, especially when one counts 57 million monthly visitors versus Britannica’s three million.
Then again, Britannica’s three million are paying visitors.
Nonetheless, Britannica confirms a leopard can change its, er, stripes, even if not completely. The two-century-year-old-and-counting encyclopedia has decided to embrace the online community, effectively tearing down—okay, well, poking a hole into—an elite institution priding itself on articles crafted by a select set of authors.
Those authors will still be in play, as will editors and scholars the encyclopedia has always relied upon. Only now, with the relaunch of the website, Britannica readers will be able to contribute their own articles, sources, and feedback, all of it vetted through the aforementioned experts, of course, and published under actual names, not anonymous handles. And of course, no public, anonymous editing.
Though it’s not clear who wrote the Britannica blog post on the subject (which would be fine if not for the authorial intrusion of “I” in the text), Britannica president Jorge Cauz makes it clear the team isn’t going the Wikipedia route completely. The writer Cauz calls Britannica’s new slant a collaborative process, not a democratic one, is significantly different from “our approach and what is popularly termed ‘Web 2.0’.”
The main thing, though, is that writers of new content have ownership of that content by submitting articles as authors have traditionally done so.
“Here I am not referring to copyright ownership but to owning the responsibility that comes with having created or documented a set of ideas or a body of knowledge,” the writer writes, writes Cauz. “That someone is, or should be, responsible for what he or she writes and shares with others is not a new idea. It has long been part of who and what we are as humans. At the new Britannica site, we will welcome and facilitate the increased participation of our contributors, scholars, and regular users, but we will continue to accept all responsibility of what we write under our name. We are not abdicating our responsibility as publishers or burying it under the now-fashionable ‘wisdom of the crowds’.”
