Encyclopedia Britannica: Side bar: Fights at the OK Encyclopedia

Activity on the online encyclopedia playground is a 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, never-ending, and not nearly as easy as Citizendium's Larry Sanger suggests.

Britannica has been in a few innovation scuffles before – the old school encyclopedia was first published in 1771. In the modern era, Britannica created its first digital encyclopedia for Lexis/Nexis in 1981, its 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, comments, "Making the transition isn't a single act; it's something you do constantly, over a long period of time. It never ends, though. We try to innovate constantly and adapt other people's innovations in a creative and sensible way to what we do. Technologies that make collaboration easier interest us a lot because for many years our work has consisted of collaborations between editors, advisors, and contributors all over the world."

Panelas has weighed in on quality-versus-quantity fisticuffs many times since the popular advent of Wikipedia. His comments about Wikipedia's infamous false-posting on the record for noted journalist John Seigenthaler in 2005 were reported by news outlets globally. Michel-Adrien Sheppard's Library Boy blog provides an excellent summary of the controversy.

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. 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.

Panelas adds, "For us, the key thing is that either the "crowd" consist of people qualified to do what they do, or if you accept contributions from a wider anonymous or pseudononymous crowd, that you have qualified people vetting their contributions. If you don't stipulate those things, you're going to have problems with quality and accuracy and worse, no matter what anyone tells you."

This point raises the issue of whether crowdsourced work must equal free open-sourced work as some strong opinions and examples suggest. Among the various crowdsourcing models evolving rapidly across many domains, efforts like Citizendium and Wikipedia are betting that information from free labor will prevail and match the reliable accuracy of the more costly Britannica.

The quality discrepancies between the volunteer and professionally generated encyclopedia entries are not as far apart as might be imagined. Or, at least, not among scientists using Wikipedia for scientific purposes, according to a contested scientist-usage study between Wikipedia and Britannica conducted by the science journal Nature and reported on by Business Week in Decemer 2005.

In the long run, hybrid efforts like InnoCentive, a company that pays crowdsourced contributors for R&D solutions, may well be the winning models for producing quality results from crowdsourced information efforts. Time will tell whether the volunteer crowdsourced encyclopedia will trump the quality from paid crowdsourced examples like Britannica, but it is certainly not a sure thing based on current results.

The Britannica Blog, launched in the past six months, cultivates crowdsourced dialog among global participants. Panelas comments, "We invite a wide range of interesting people to post on our blog, a medium that's less formal than the encyclopedia. It's a place where our friends, contributors, and even our editors can have their say on topical issues in ways that wouldn't be right for the encyclopedia. A lot of people are reading it, and a lot of people are writing for it. Plus, it is a way for us to meet new people who can write for us in other capacities."

The Britannica blog mirrors the experimental Assignment Zero crowdsourced journalism web site in that it prestages in a public way the draft development of final content that may appear in more formal ways in Wired online or in the official Britannica encyclopedia. These efforts, in fact, are more than blogs and hearken possible quality control methods for managing the new crowdsourcing content development processes.

Perhaps Britannica will prevail again, teaching Citizendium the old lesson – putting your quality words where your mouth is – is more difficult than just having a willingness to scuffle.