A couple of weeks ago, Mark Bauerlein wrote an interesting piece about Wikipedia's stylistic mediocrity, and the way this mediocrity is bleeding into his students' writing. Using the example of articles about Moby Dick, Bauerlein suggests that traditional professionally-authored encyclopedias tend to be written in a punchier, more engaging style. The JOHO blog responds with a couple of interesting points. It suggests that Wikipedia's policy of describing things from a neutral point of view might wind up making them less compelling reading. Indeed, a crucial part of good writing is knowing what to leave out, and that's hard to accomplish when you're trying to present all sides of a subject in a neutral manner. Still, the JOHO blog points out that when you look at the Wikipedia article's section on Captain Ahab -- as opposed to the introductory passage -- the difference with professionally-edited works isn't as stark as Bauerlein suggests. It's uneven and could certainly use some help from a professional editor, but it presents the essential information in a coherent and engaging fashion.

In any event, the fundamental lesson here is that teachers should be explicitly teaching their students how to use Wikipedia correctly. Wikipedia isn't a role model for good writing, nor should it be cited as an authoritative source. But it's an incredibly useful source if used correctly -- as a starting point for learning about a new topic and finding pointers to more authoritative sources on that topic. The Wikipedia editing process is optimized for these purposes, focusing on breadth and timeliness more than perfect accuracy or style. I think one good way to help teach this point would be for professors to edit Wikipedia articles on overhead projectors in front of their classes. This would provide some real-world examples of mediocre style to critique and improve in an interactive fashion. It would also give students a clear sense of how Wikipedia works, which is the first step to understanding how to use it well. People are much less likely to take Wikipedia as gospel after seeing their professors change it. And of course, it would help improve Wikipedia for everyone else; if the idea caught on, it might be only a few years before professors started having problems finding articles that still needed improving.

A while back I did a slightly flippant post suggesting that Britannica's Webshare program -- which allows bloggers free access to the Britannica website -- was a step in the right direction, but was probably too little, too late to compete effectively against Wikipedia. Jorge Cauz, Britannica president, asked for the opportunity to give his side of the story, and so we're pleased to feature this short interview, which was conducted last Wednesday.

I was reasonably impressed with Cauz's answers. Competing against Wikipedia is an awfully difficult thing to do, and Cauz seems to be doing many of the right things -- focusing on timeliness, collaboration, and other areas where Wikipedia currently has the edge. He points out that Britannica has another line of products in the K-12 education space, which suggests that Britannica is already leveraging its brand name in other businesses, suggesting that my idea of licensing the brand to another company might not be such a good idea.

Nevertheless, I think Britannica is going to face a serious uphill challenge to remain relevant in a Wikipedia-dominated encyclopedia market. Cauz says that traffic has grown 40 percent in the last two years, and that 17 percent of its traffic comes from its Webshare program. But 40 percent traffic growth isn't that impressive when we consider how far behind Britannica is to Wikipedia in web traffic. For example, between January 2006 and January 2007, Wikipedia more than doubled its traffic. If Britannica is growing at 20 percent per year and Wikipedia is growing at 150 percent a year, Britannica's will become less and less relevant in terms of market share. So while Britannica's market share may not be literally dwindling, they're going to have to take some much more radical steps if they want to capture more than a trivial share of the encyclopedia market.

Techdirt: Mr. Cauz, thanks for taking the time to talk to us. Tell me a little bit about the Webshare program.

Jorge Cauz: I don't recall exactly when it was launched, but we launched the functionality a couple of years ago. It has been implemented for a while and the main idea behind the Webshare program was trying to make sure that people link to us freely and make sure that the people who follow those links can have access to Britannica. I read your post, and in contrast to your belief that many people won't do it--or at least that you won't do it--we now have close to 17 percent of our traffic coming from people directly linking to us. So Webshare has been a good way for us to show non-subscribers the depth, breadth, and quality of the content we have. So I think it's good for us and good for the readers of our content.

And the other 83 percent are paid subscribers?

Well, they're basically paid subscribers, people that are coming and visiting us. We have several different sites, but on the consumer site, we have about 700,000 unique visitors every day.

What's your long-term vision for the site, and for the company? Is it going to continue to be a subscription-based website? Is the paper-based encyclopedia going to continue?

Paper is completely incidental for us. It's not a very important business for us. We continue to do it and it continues to be profitable, but it is a very small portion of our business and an even smaller portion of our profits. Britannica basically is a digital company today. The majority of our revenues come from non-tangible products, both in the institutional market and the consumer space. I read your advice on your blog, and I think your suggestions for business models are faulty.

I think that there are plenty of ways in which Britannica can continue to grow in the future. Many of them are in the e-learning space. Today we have more than than 47 percent penetration in the K-12 market. We have almost 70 percent penetration in the public library market. And these aren't just reference products. These are e-learning solutions around the teacher. We try to be a more relevant source in the classroom as opposed to in the library. There are programs that are linked to the curriculum that are reading level appropriate that are full of lesson plans and interaction materials that are much more part of the learning process as opposed to a passive role in the reference products. There's a huge new stream of revenue coming in from these e-learning products in the K-12 market.

And I certainly didn't mean to suggest that all of those products weren't viable. My focus was more on the encyclopedia.

But that's far from licensing the brand as an empty shell to someone who wants to do something like Napster. That's actually, I think, myopic.

Sure, that's a good point. So in terms of the encyclopedia, the long-term market you think is primarily in k-12 education?

No, no, no. We have very different databases and very different services. We have products that are meant for young kids. We have products that are meant for the middle school market. And there are products like the Encyclopedia Britannica, which is meant for the generally curious lay person. You know, that will continue to be an important part of our business, and it will continue to be an important part of our effort. That database, and the service that we provide for those people that are seeking knowledge and are intellectually curious, you know that product, which I think has great potential.

I tend to disagree with you in terms of your assessment of Britannica vs. Wikipedia. I do think that we are obviously, by the nature of what we do and how we go about it, we are a smaller dataset than that of Wikipedia but size is not the only thing that matters. Timeliness--I tend to disagree with you. We change our articles not every month, not every week, but we change our articles on a daily basis. If things require, we change our articles every 20 minutes. We have a publishing system that allows us to change our articles immediately. We have a publishing system that engages communities and users with our content and allows them to actually spot things that may be not updated and for us to turn our attention to those and actually be able to process those things quite immediately.

Our new generation of products, which you'll see very very soon, you'll see a very different version. You will start seeing completely new features into the Britannica products in the consumer space, where the key thing here is collaboration. It's about ownership of content--not ownership in terms of who owns the copyright, which is completely incidental--ownership in terms of who is behind the content and who is saying what. So you will see really quite a different Britannica and we believe that you will be pleasantly surprised. I hope to be able talk to you six months or a year from now and be able to revisit some of your business model proposals for Britannica. Maybe see if what we're doing is something that you think would be profitable.

By the way, for the record, you mentioned that we have a dwindling number of subscribers. We have grown thanks to the clarity with which the market has in terms of the difference between us and Wikipedia and the other competitors, subscribers in the consumer space have grown 40 percent in the two years. Revenue from the institutional market and in the college market alone has gone up more than 25 percent. So it's not a dwindling number, but a larger market because of some of the factors that you might be dismissive of: factually correct, objective. Not neutral point of view like Wikipedia. We don't strive for that. We think there are reasonable, informed points of view that are worthwhile exploring and letting the reader be exposed to it. We try to reach objectivity by having a fair share of these points and counterpoints being discussed in articles at great length. There's a huge amount of respect for factual correctness at Britannica, for objectivity.

Also, Britannica has an impeccable style that people are able to understand, that people are able to learn from Britannica basic language rules, things that will not be happening in Wikipedia. Obviously, up-to-date-ness is something that we don't relax on. We update the database at the rate of about 30-35 percent per year. A third of the database is completely revised on a yearly basis thanks to the input of our contributors. That's something that is probably much more speedy than Wikipedia. Obviously Wikipedia cannot do that because they are several times as large as we are. So again, a few of the things that I believe are either urban myth or people want to believe or "truthiness" are not necessarily corresponding with how we see it and how we can actually tell you that it is. We do have the numbers with us, and we do have the ability to refute some of these statements.

Can you talk a little bit more about the editing process? You mentioned timeliness, and you mentioned collaboration. One of the things I've found very impressive on Wikipedia is that if a news event happens, say somebody famous dies, it will be a matter of seconds before that's updated on Wikipedia. Does Britannica have something like that?

Yes we do. Editors have the ability to go into the database and incorporate a change as it happens. When it's important, the community will flag it, and an editor will change it in 20 minutes at the most. The editor can go in and publish directly online, and then we actually circumvent the process so when a person is actually changing an emergent fact that has been noticed, the copy-editing department doesn't get involved and the indexing department doesn't get involved. The editor has full power to make the changes that he or she sees as required. This is happening more and more.

These are some of the things we will see more evident. We will be able to not only change more frequently with the help of our editors and contributors with the new site that we will have but we will actually try to make sure that our users and visitors engage with the content much more frequently and use the content also for their own purposes in a different way. So again, it's not going to be a wiki. Britannica will not delegate its responsibility as an editor. I think that you shouldn't delegate your responsibility for what you say. You know, you have your name on your blog, and whether it's true or not, you need to be behind it. We believe that that's really a good model, with the view that the Internet actually provides huge opportunities for Britannica in the future. We believe that we're going to be the first ones to make the process of creating knowledge a really, truly collaborative process without delegating the responsibility of us editors. I think it will be more evident in the next few weeks and months.

One of the trends I think we've seen recently is that search engines have become an increasingly important source of traffic. Is Britannica doing anything to make it easier for people to get to? So if an article comes up in a search engine result, is there a way that people can get access to that article for free or would they have to become subscribers in order to do that?

We are trying some different things in that area. We're actually trying to segment the market, and these are some things that I'm not ready to discuss at this point but we're doing continuous testing with search engines, trying to see what are the different ways in which we can segment the market and allow people to use our content for certain occasions without entirely giving away the subscription model which is still very important for us. It may change in the future or it may not; I'm not really married to the subscription model. I think there's huge potential in the free web for Britannica.

So you think that in the future, the site could become a completely free, advertising supported site?

No, what I'm saying is that there would be a very good version of Britannica that would be free.

Jacob Grier points out the launch of Britannica Webshare, a service that will allow bloggers to access the Encyclopedia Britannica for free, and even to provide links that will allow readers to read individual articles -- but not the whole encyclopedia -- for free. This is a fine step, as far as it goes. But it's a comically small step given the challenges Britannica is facing. The site apparently still won't be available to non-bloggers, and presumably that means it also won't be available on search engines. And that means they're throwing away a huge chunk of their potential audience. But the more fundamental problem is that Wikipedia is already a much better encyclopedia, and it continues to improve rapidly. Wikipedia is roughly as accurate and it's an order of magnitude timelier and more comprehensive. I wouldn't use Britannica much if it were freely available; I'm certainly not going to waste time applying to be a part of its "Webshare" program.

We write a lot about old-media companies that are struggling to adapt to the Internet. We usually suggest business models that will help these business cope, and maybe even thrive, in the new technological environment. But I think Britannica might be a rare exception where the situation really is hopeless. Most old media companies, including Hollywood, the record labels, newspapers and magazines, and comic book producers, have a ton of content that people want, and that provides a foundation for their business models. In contrast, Britannica doesn't have any significant advantages over Wikipedia, and in some respects -- especially breadth and timeliness -- it's markedly inferior. As a result, it would be unlikely to get significant traffic even if it did everything else right. So I think there's a good argument to be made for laying off everyone involved in creating new versions of the encyclopedia and just leaving in place a skeleton staff in charge of selling the current edition to the dwindling number of people willing to pay for it.

The last time we wrote about the challenges facing Britannica, a representative from the company suggested a lot of people thought that Britannica hadn't yet made the transition to the web. But that's not my point at all. The fundamental problem is simply a matter of manpower. Wikipedia has tens of thousands of volunteer editors who collectively donate millions of hours of labor to the project. There's simply no way that a commercial encyclopedia edited in a traditional, hierarchical fashion, can compete with that. Britannica has to pay its editors, while Wikipedia gets its editors for free. Britannica likes to emphasize that its articles are written by credentialed experts. But this misses the point in a couple of ways. In the first place, while experts aren't given formal authority on Wikipedia, there are plenty of subject matter experts contributing to Wikipedia articles. More importantly, Wikipedia's editing process is based not on the authority of any one expert, but by citing reliable sources that anyone can check to verify the accuracy of the information. This kind of distributed peer review has allowed Wikipedia to produce a lot more content, with roughly the same accuracy, without hiring professional editors. There's just no way that a traditionally-organized commercial encyclopedia can keep up.

One valuable asset they do still have is their brand name, and I can see a couple of ways they might leverage it. One would be to simply auction it off to a totally different company that could put it to a better use -- the same way that the new Napster had no real connection to the old Napster. There might be a company out there with a different business model that would gain increased visibility with the Britannica brand. Another approach would be to turn lemonade into lemons by publishing a paper version of Wikipedia under the Britannica brand. This is one place where the established brand name would still be a big advantage; anyone who still wanted to buy a paper encyclopedia (it's a mystery to me why anyone would, but I'm sure they're out there) will probably prefer a Britannica-branded one, even if the content is identical to what you'd find on Wikipedia. Similarly, a lightly-edited, Britannica-branded web version of Wikipedia could generate some nice advertising revenue without requiring a big staff to produce new content. But I don't think there's any way a traditionally-produced encyclopedia can compete with Wikipedia, and programs like Webshare are too little, too late. The company needs to take some much more dramatic measures.

One of the most common reactions when people first learn about Wikipedia is to wonder where people find the time to write millions of articles for free. That's precisely the reaction Clay Shirky got (thanks to Luis Villa) from, ironically enough, a television producer. Shirky points out the obvious answer: people spend a lot more time watching dumb television shows than they do contributing to Wikipedia. Shirky estimates that Wikipedia represents about 100 million hours of collective effort by Wikipedia's editors. In contrast, Americans spend something like 200 billion hours watching television each year. And however pathetic people might find it that someone would spend their evenings having edit wars with people on Wikipedia, it's surely more pathetic to spend your evenings on the couch watching re-runs of Gilligan's Island. Even an online game like World of Warcraft, which many people deride as nerdy and anti-social, at least involves interacting with other people. Indeed Shirky argues, correctly in my view, that the transformation of our social lives from passive to active forms of entertainment is just beginning. People still spend a huge amount of time consuming passive media like television. If even a small fraction of that mental energy was diverted to more active pursuits, it could lead to the production of dozens of socially-beneficial efforts like Wikipedia. The problem isn't finding people with time on their hands; we've got tens of millions of those. The challenge is finding socially-beneficial projects that they'll enjoy participating in more than re-runs of Seinfeld.

"People are unwittingly trusting the information they find on Wikipedia, yet experience has shown it can be wrong, incomplete, biased, or misleading."