Activity on the online encyclopedia playground is a downright throwdown between quality and quantity.
The longstanding quality champ, Encyclopedia Britannica, musters toe-to-toe with the best quantity Wikipedia has to offer, often winning on authority. The new kid, Citizendium, is stepping into the fray mid-fight hoping to emulate Britannica's powerful quality hook and Wikipedia's rapid quantity jab to capture the title of best encyclopedia in both quality and quantity. However, Britannica's record indicates the process to develop qualified content is arduous and neverending -- perhaps more difficult than Citizendium founder Larry Sanger might know.
Britannica has been in a few innovation scuffles before -- the old-school encyclopedia was first published in 1768.
In the modern era, Britannica created its first digital encyclopedia for Lexis/Nexis in 1981, the first ever multi-media encyclopedia in 1989, and was the first to transition an encyclopedia to the internet in 1994.
Tom Panelas, Director of Corporate Communications at Encyclopedia Britannica, says, "Making the transition isn't a single act; it's something you do constantly, over a long period of time. It never ends."
Britannica uses one hundred editors to manage submissions from four thousand expert contributors around the globe, making it arguably the first crowdsourced encyclopedia, albeit not one produced with free labor or offering free content -- though the online encyclopedias invite comments and suggestions for text changes. Paid Britannica contributors and editors vet and qualify the information through a long established verification process before publication. Notably, Britannica's online editions have not yet employed the Wiki-powered web site.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
