Death of the Encyclopedia

Today, the Wall Street Journal Online published an interesting debate between the head honchos of Wikipedia and Britannica. The latter has been around since 1768; the former has been online since 2001. Jimmy Wales, the founder and chairman of the Wikimedia Foundation, squared off against Dale Hoiberg, the current senior vice president and editor in chief of Encyclopedia Britannica Inc, to discuss which publication model is better.

While the battle joined in earnest last December with Nature magazine’s comparison of the content in both publications (see this Word doc for details), increased media attention has drawn fire on wikis from other corners. The L.A. Times Wikitorial fiasco … Defra’s government wiki problems … John Seigenthaler’s criticism of Wikipedia upon finding his bio linked him with the Kennedy assassinations … parodies by Stephen Colbert and the Onion. In the WSJ article, Wales even helps Hoiberg by pointing to criticism of Wikipedia found on its own site. EB also took a hit from onlookers when a 12-year-old boy found errors in the tomes. The Nature investigation has yielded a rebuttal by EB (PDF) and a response to that response by the magazine. This is an interesting backdrop, developed over the past year, to an email conversation between two voices that count most.

Wikipedia is young and democratic, says the word on the street. It’s all about community. It’s Web 2.0, wiki and a host of other catch phrases. The popular image is EB, on the other hand, is a dinosaur, hoarding the World’s knowledge to make a buck, with just a handful of elitists determining what it is that we know. Hoiberg notes that, “Britannica draws from a community, just as Wikipedia does. Ours consists of more than 4,000 scholars and experts around the world who serve as our contributors and advisers.” I found that statement very potent, even if issues of access, responsibility and degree of collaboration are not implicitly addressed by it. He also makes a nice observation:

From where I sit it seems like Wikipedia is at a bit of a crossroads. It has grown very large and now wants to focus on quality. That’s good. But despite what Mr. Wales says in this post, the road to better quality at Wikipedia seems to be paved with less openness, not more.

This echoes the conclusion of the recent Wired editorial experiement that more authors bring more ideas, making the content richer, but professional editors get paid for a reason.

Wales contends that the secret to success is openness. That is a stated goal of the project, to become more open. While criticized for Wikipedia’s past responses to page vandalism, Wales emphasized the evolution of that response. Problem pages used to be completely locked from editing for short periods, until the negative interest faded. Wikipedia currently employs a policy of semi-protection, where only those most likely to be vandals — anonymous and newly registered members — are prevented from making changes. Wales called the improvements “impressive.” Now, the German Wikipedia is experimenting with a less-exclusive version where that same group must have their edits approved by other community members. “Each of these steps is designed to be more open, and each is also designed to help achieve higher quality,” writes Wales.