October 30, 2007
Squaring up to Wikipedia
Larry Sanger is still predicting big things for Citizendium, the expert-moderated alternative to the "open" encyclopedia Wikipedia that he launched a year ago (we wrote about the launch here, and the implications of the Citizendium v Wikipedia battle here.)
Given the scale of his ambition, the results so far are decidedly modest: 3,300 articles, growing at the rate of 14 a day, compared to more than 2m on the English-language version of Wikipedia. Still, Sanger, who was in at the beginning of Wikipedia, is unabashed, as his update today demonstrates:
At some point, possibly very soon, the Citizendium will grow explosively–say, quadruple the number of its active contributors, or even grow by an order of magnitude. And it will experience that growth over the course of a month or two, and its growth will continue to accelerate from that higher rate.
Comments like that make it sound like Sanger is succumbing to wishful thinking in his efforts to hit back at old nemesis Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia. Still, he has a point in one regard. Projects like this are deeply viral, and many of the experts he wants to attract will only jump in once they feel a tipping point has been reached.
As Wikipedia’s extraordinary expansion continues, I for one hope Sanger gets the formula right. It’s way too early in the development of the internet to hand so much influence over what passes for human knowledge to a single, still largely experimental website like Wikipedia.
Dear Richard,
Britannica Online provides the platform of confidence you seek: 45 million checked, edited and constantly updated words, with text databases edited for adult, secondary school and primary school audiences; 23,000 still and moving images. I acknowledge an interest - I am MD of Britannica’s EMEA business.
In the UK Britannica is largely free at the point of use - for students and teachers in subscribing institutions (and most colleges and universities are), for users of public libraries (and, on typing in your library card number, at home) in 90% of the UK’s boroughs. And to become an individual subscriber to Britannica, the outlay is very modest indeed.
Britannica operates in the shifting online knowledge world with a deep experience of publishing the current best guess of the facts about, and an intelligent understanding of, the universe we live in and our place within it. It sits alongside Google and Wikipedia, with a different proposition for the user. Britannica says that if you come to Britannica with no knowledge of a subject, then you can be very confident of leaving with a clear understanding of the principal features of that subject appropriate to your age-level, without having to second-guess what you have read. It is written by 4,500 people who know what they are talking about, fact-checked and edited for consistency of language, tone and age-level.
Britannica is the world’s backstory. When something happens, if you want to know how we got here from there, Britannica will give you the context. It is the first trustworthy port of call for school, undergraduate and general research and fact-checking. With Britannica, you can know for sure. Consequently, Britannica is a profitable, growing publishing business, primarily driven by revenue from subscriptions to Britannica on line.
Born in the Scottish Enlightenment, in 1768, Britannica has not missed a day of publication since. Its values - it is educated, reasoned, current, humane and confident - have not changed since its birth, and remain as important in information publishing today as they ever were. Its values don’t change; its publishing technology is as current as tomorrow; and Britannica is frequently cited as the gold standard in the current debate about confidence in knowledge. We have done a fair amount of Larry Sanger’s work already.
With kind regards
Yours sincerely,
Ian Grant
Posted by: Ian Grant | November 5th, 2007 at 10:07 am | Report this comment