Encyclopedia Britannica often is used in case studies as a definitive example of how new technology can disrupt a business. Everything was great for the nearly 250 year old privately held company until the Internet came around and a Category Five hurricaned on their parade. According to Comscore, for every page viewed on Brittanica.com, 184 pages are viewed on Wikipedia (3.8 billion v. 21 million pave views per month). In short, they are a classic example of the Innovator’s Dilemma (see also the Music Industry).

You can purchase the 32 volume Britannica, which has 65,000 articles and 44 million words, for just $1,400. Or you can access it on the web for $70 per year.

And now, you can get access to the online version for free through a new program called Britannica Webshare - provided that you are a “web publisher.” The definition of a web publisher is rather squishy: “This program is intended for people who publish with some regularity on the Internet, be they bloggers, webmasters, or writers. We reserve the right to deny participation to anyone who in our judgment doesn’t qualify.” Basically, you sign up, tell them about your site URL and a description, and they review it and decide if you’ll get in. I wonder if Facebook, MySpace and Twitter users are eligible? They all certainly “publish with some regularity on the Internet.”

Once you’re in, you get to link to the full version of articles - people clicking the link can read that article but they can’t go and read other parts of the Britannica site. Participants can also embed widgets like the following:

Half Pregnant

Britannica is doing a lot of things right - a relatively small staff of a hundred or so editors manages 4,000 unpaid (I believe) contributors who are recognized experts in their field. But, like the music labels, they still somehow feel as though people should pay to consume their content. And that means search engines can’t index their content. And that means they don’t exist.

Instead of going free and opening up to all, they’re using the new program to simply price discriminate. Give people who may link to the site free access. Everyone else has to pay. So in effect they’re aiming to be half pregnant - they want the benefits of web linking but don’t want to give up the subscription fees from the fools who continue to pay them.

As an outsider, Britannica’s future is clear. Eventually, and if they don’t go out of business first, they’ll be forced to make all their content freely available on the Internet, and will probably create a wiki-like format that allows user editing. Their differentiating factor from Wikipedia will be that they have experts guiding articles, so they’ll have a claim to be more authoritative. This is, by the way, the business model of Citizendium, created by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger in 2006.

The sooner they do that the more likely they’ll be around for the long term. Perhaps they can even continue to sell those 32 volume sets to a few libraries. But it’s hard to give up that online subscription revenue. When this fails, they’ll try something else.

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Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has announced that his new knowledge sharing wiki project called Citizendium will launch at the end of this month or earlier. The defining characteristic of the site is that topic experts will have final, enforceable authority to “resolve” controversy and kick out trolls. Citizendium will be a progressive fork of Wikipedia, allowing its own community to change Wikipedia articles but also offering Wikipedia’s version of those that haven’t been edited in Citizendium. Sanger says the topic experts will function like village elders or college professors - they’ll simply make the wiki a civilized place.

I like variations on familiar models and the web 2.0 certainly isn’t set in stone; but there are a number of reasons I’m very skeptical of Citizendium.

Citizendium is not connected to Larry Sanger’s earlier work at the Digital Universe Foundation, whose press release still refers people interested in providing expertise to a similar project to an URL that ends in XXX and brings up a 404. Nor is Citizendium tied to the Sanger directed Text Outline Project, yet another very similar endeavor that Sanger now says he will come back to “in a year or two.” It is reminiscent of the predecessor of Wikipedia, Nupedia - which Sanger was the editor in chief of just like he will be for Citizendium. Nupedia allegedly flopped under the weight of its PhD requirements, software inadequacies, the superiority of the wiki model in general and Wikipedia in particular.

In other words, barring further information about Citizendium - it’s hard to take it seriously. The project does have some stuffy backing for its snoozer of a text-only web site so perhaps it will prove viable. I’m not holding my breath.

The project has not announced what its model will be for experts to gain editor status. Those criteria will be published in draft form in the next few weeks, the site says - though by that time Citizendium is apparently going to be live. The FAQ does say that a Ph.D. will be neither necessary nor sufficient for editorship.

Does Wikipedia need to be fixed? I’m not entirely convinced that it does, as the page history function makes an article (almost) impossible to destroy. The discussion tab on Wikipedia is a great place to point to your favorite version. Is that too noisy? Is it too common for people with valuable knowledge to be turned off from participating? Does the world need a Wikipedia for stick-in-the-muds? Maybe it does, but I’m not going to get too excited about it and this effort in particular seems unlikely to succeed.

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