Encyclopaedia Britannica Stop The Presses

Encyclopaedia Britannica have announced what we all thought had already happened and that it will cease production of its printed 32-volume Encyclopaedia. Encyclopaedia Britannica remains the oldest English-language encyclopaedia being first published in Edinburgh 244 years ago, between 1768 and 1771. The original three volume set grew in size and reputation and became the first encyclopaedia to adopt "continuous revision", where every article updated on a schedule.

The migration from print to digital was an obvious early route for heavy reference works such as encyclopaedias. After all users wanted up to the minute information not material that was often out of date the minute it went to press. The writing was on the wall after the successes of Compton's Multimedia Encyclopaedia in 1989 and The New Grolier Multimedia Encyclopaedia in 1992 both being quickly followed by Microsoft’s Encarta in 1993. Microsoft cut corners by purchasing non-exclusive rights to the Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopaedia and incorporating the material into its first edition. Encarta changed encyclopaedias and by 2008, the, Encarta Premium, consisted of more than 62,000 articles, numerous photos and illustrations, music clips, videos, interactive contents, timelines, maps and atlas, and homework tools, and was available by yearly subscription or by purchase on DVD or multiple CDs. In March 2009, Microsoft announced it was discontinuing the Encarta disc and online versions. The MSN Encarta site closed on December 31, 2009.Microsoft continued to operate the Encarta online dictionary at dictionary.msn.com until 2011.

Wikipedia changed the market again when it was launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger by creating a free, collaborative, multilingual Internet encyclopedia supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. It now has 21 million articles, written collaboratively by 100,000 regularly active contributors the world and edited by anyone with access. It is now the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet and has an estimated 365 million readers worldwide with some2.7 billion monthly pageviews from the United States alone.
Then there was Google the definitive and de facto search engine.

Britannica today only derives some 1% of it revenues from the printed encyclopaedia rendition and its online version, which was first published in 1994, represents only 15% of Britannica's revenue. Britannica now generates some 84% of sales from education materials and is planning to relaunch it encyclopaedia site to add more social connections and interactivity.

So in a period of less than two decades the face of reference publishing has changed dramatically not just with respect to the finished, or living form, but how it is managed, edited, developed, marketed and the price paid for it.

Wikipedia Reaches New Landmark

In 8 years the people’s encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, has changed collective reference and how we collaboratively edit and manage complex works such as encyclopaedias. Gone are the large sets of tomes bought by parents in the hope that their children may benefit. Now Wikipedia is one click away, free and with over 10 million registered members, 17 million pages, a network of over 13 million articles in hundreds of different languages, it truly is the people’s reference work.

Understandably, the number of articles being added has reduced from an average of 2,200 a day in July 2007 to around 1,300 today but it continues to grow organically. Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales’s, recent call for additional funds to help keep the non-profit organisation encyclopaedia going, resulted in $6 million in donations from its benefactors.

Now an article on Norwegian actress and film director Beate Eriksen has become the 3 millionth English language article on the site.

The English version of Wikipedia remains the largest, with the German Wikipedia having close to 1 million articles, the French some 800,000 articles and the Japanese, Polish and Italian sites have around 600,000 each.
Science journal Nature in 2005 said it was about as accurate as the Encyclopaedia Brittanica,.
Despite its issues, Wikipedia remains one of the most popular sites on the web and has proved a source of knowledge and inspiration to other projects hoping to harness the collaborative knowledge of large groups of people.
Well done.

Wikipedia and the NPG Fall Out Over Copyright

You can pay to view a picture in a gallery, but even though it was painted centuries ago they are not public domain once the image is digitised. Some say that owners of out of copyright material are not going to digitised works if the derivative works they create aren’t protected and as a result everyone will be the poorer. Others would argue that they are public domain and should be free to all.

Wikipedia has caused a storm in using images from the UK’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG). They say the gallery is betraying its public service mission, the gallery says it needs to recoup the £1m cost of its digitisation programme. The gallery appears to be objecting more to the use of high resolution images which they can earn off. The NPG says that their images in books and magazines generated £339,000 in the last year and that the current situation jeopardises their ability to internally fund their digitisation process.

Other institutions have made significant donations to the non-for–profit encyclopaedia but the NPG wants money and insists that its case has been misrepresented, and deny that it has been "locking up and limiting access to educational materials".

So when is the digitisation of public material ‘private’ and for sale only, and when is it ‘free’? The NPG claim that Wikipedia infringed English copyright laws, which protect copies of original works even when they themselves are out of copyright. They also claim that special software was used to "de-scramble" the high-resolution tiles, allowing the whole portrait to be seen in high resolution.

It’s another case of he who pays to digitise, regenerates copyright on the derivative work and in this case there is only one copy to digitise, so ownership also counts. We wonder why Wikipedia needed high resolution for online use and guess we will all continue to enjoy the real thing in galleries.

Wiki Search RIP

Wikia Search, a project created by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales with the aim of creating a community-led search engine, has failed Wales has announced that Wikia search, which was once presented as a potential rival to Google, will be closing down only 15 months after it was launched.

Wales will refocus efforts on social network Wikia, which, in common with all Wiki projects, has a community-driven content approach. Even though Wikia has been one of the fastest growing community destinations with some reaching 3.76 million members in February (according to Nielsen) but that wasn’t enough for Wales to continue. Unlike Wikipedia, Wikia Search was always intended to be a profit making business, with money coming from advertising. A difficult task in today’s economy.

In his interview with the BBC Mr Wales played up the role of users as editors but said there were no plans to allow them to claim a share in the revenue.

Wikia’s closure now creates doubts about the future of other similar search engines such as Chacha and Mahalo.

Microsoft Encarta RIP

As a child we were haunted by those tomes Encyclopedia Britannica and the notion that a set of books would transforms any young student into a class topping genius. Also the books still linger on shelves in many family homes, or have long gone. Then in the 90s we had Microsoft Encarta. Who needed the tome when you could have it on a CD? Then came Wikipedia, who not only transformed access but more importantly democratised its development.

Microsoft has offered limited online selection for free and a much larger selection of 42,000 entries for a subscription, but are unable to compete with Wikipedia’s 2.7 million articles. It failed to grasp the concept of user generated content and editorial by democratisation.

Today, Ars Technica report that Microsoft’s Encarta, has come to the end of its life and will be no more. ‘On October 31, 2009, MSN Encarta Web sites worldwide will be discontinued, with the exception of Encarta Japan, which will be discontinued on December 31, 2009’. Microsoft says that the ‘category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed…people today seek and consume information in considerably different ways.’

Wikipedia may have its faults but it is changing how we create, mediate, access, use and value the ultimate reference material. The question we now have to ask is what the next generation will be?

UK Primary Pupils to be Switched On?

They say that education should prepare you for the outside world and UK draft education curriculum plans drawn up by Sir Jim Rose, the former Ofsted chief, appointed to overhaul the primary school curriculum, certainly will shake the tree. The plans due to be published next month were leaked by the Guardian and include plans that require children to master Twitter and Wikipedia. They emphasise traditional learning such as phonics, the chronology of history and mental arithmetic, but now include modern media and web-based skills as well as a greater focus on environmental education.

The Guardian claim that the proposals would require, ‘Children to leave primary school familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter as sources of information and forms of communication. They must gain "fluency" in handwriting and keyboard skills, and learn how to use a spellchecker alongside how to spell.’

Irrespective of what the final paper says and what gets implemented, there is a clear shift towards new media and communications skills and the obvious questions will be raised about basics and dumbing-down.

Its amazing that technologies that are under ten years old are accepted as basic building blocks for children who themselves may only be a little older than the tools they are grappling with and whose parents may not be conversant with.

The other certainty is that we will be educating a generation to express themselves creatively very differently from those before them. This is not just a shift in how people read and consume media but how they create and express themselves and this will certainly change what we know as content moving forward.

Dead In The Water?

Has the world gone mad? We have all read about the various companies who sold bottled tap water as natural spring water. We have seen the scene in ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ where the water bottle top is being resealed with glue. Now we read about a German publisher who plans to sell free Wikipedia material designer print on demand works.
Some may applaud their innovation and the ability to monetize what many view as free.

The essence of Wikipedia is to be a living and evolving point of reference. It encourages online input from all and in doing so democratizes the work. It also encourages online peer review providing auto correction and validation. It strength is that it is being constantly appended, edited and referenced. The new venture works contrary to this and the reality is that the moment it is captured in print it no longer is Wikipedia and becomes just another dead tree.

So we now have a tie-up between PediaPress, Wikipedia and Lightning Source. Where Lightning Source will be responsible for all the printing, Wikipedia obviously the database and source and some may suggest PediaPress for bottling the water from the tap.

The service uses an authoring tool that ‘plugs directly into the Wikipedia sites’ so users can pick and choose for their on-demand titles. The 20x14cm books are perfect bound with colour covers and black-and-white text pages. They will retail at around €7.99 for 100pp up to €26 for 700pp.

It must be getting close to April 1st!

Wiki Madness

What on earth do you want to print copies of Wikipedia for?

As soon as you transfer the first page to print, its out of date. As the print is bound and the copies shipped, it becomes more out of date. By the time a customer has bought it, it is definitely out of date.

Although Bertelsmann are only going to print 25,000 of the most popular pages on German Wikipedia, it makes no sense. At just under 20 euros the one volume, initial 20,000 print run is set to go on sale in September. The questions are who would buy it and why?

Perhaps it’s relatively free content, with Bertelsmann reporting to be paying, one euro a copy for using the Wikipedia name in the title. Perhaps Bertelsmann get the copyright to reuse the content and avoid those 90K authors that they would have had to normally pay. Perhaps it’s just a gamble to see if customers are daft enough to pay for something that was conceived to replace what it is – abridged out of date material. Perhaps it’s approaching Frankfurt and someone dreamt up a way to get publicity at any cost.

Whatever, it clearly is summer madness!

Britannia Goes Wiki?

We have all witnessed the ‘We Think’ world described so succinctly by Charles Leadbeater. Readers have started to become users and are now contributing to the content not just digesting it. The best examples of this are Wikipedia and social sites such as You Tube. This has lead to the debate on the value of expert contributions and editorial versus self governance and somewhere between is probably the ideal model.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica, which relies on expert, edited contributions for its content has now, according to a post on Ars Technica, started to change. They have announced a tightly controlled system allowing users to generate and comment on content. Britannica are not embracing the wiki model but a "collaborative-but-not-democratic," one. Contributors to the Encyclopaedia are being encouraged to create detailed profiles on Britannica's site, qualifying themselves and listing their other works on the topics. Once accepted these ‘experts’ will be enabled to comment on entries, update their own versions, or even add new content.

The difference being that to be involved users must provide a full identity and qualification. Britannica's editors will be on the watch for any relevant updates to their material, and have the option of incorporating user-generated content if they feel it's of sufficient quality and importance. The user will be fully credited for their contribution.

Although a significant change, we would question whether its too little, too late. Wikipedia may have some errors and not be perfect but its content covers a far wider subject matter and is also more topical. Wikipedia continues to defy all the logic that Britannica was built on but it now appears that they are starting to acknowledge that, albeit very cautiously..

Open-Source Wiki-Search

Can we ever envisage anyone threatening Google’s position and dominance of the search engine market? It is like asking if anyone can seriously threaten Microsoft’s Office or operating system dominance. The reality is that things change and usually the change is driven by a different business model and approach.

So we read with great interest that Jimmy Wales, the Wikipedia founder, is planning to launch an open-source search engine. He plans to provide the tools and technology to allow programmers across the Internet to collaborate on the development and testing of a search engine and make the results freely available. The project is still in the planning stages and the first test version is due later this year and will help programmers de bug the code.It is already attracting interest not only from the ‘wikiphobes’ and open source followers but also from those tier two search engines that are being squeezed out by the big boys.

Just as Wikipedia was built on collaboration and an open approach, then so this new venture. It will provide a level playing field where lots of people can contribute. Wales aims to give away all the technology, all the data. Release everything under a free license and follow the success story as Wikipedia.

Accuracy and relevance are key to search engines. Today the search algorithm is the most closely guarded secret of companies like Google because it determines how high a particular site is ranked. If the algorithm is public then it would mean site owners could abuse the rankings and attract the attention of spammers. Wales hopes that the community approach that ‘polices’ the Wiki world will transfer to the new search environment and keep the results clean.

Pick up a Penguin

I recently watched TV programme which showed a colony of penguins ritually landing on an obscure Antarctica bay. They were driven ashore in hostile waters bouncing against the rocks and then finally scrambling on land before they waddled upwards to the safety of their breeding grounds. Could they not find an easier route with less danger?

This week Penguin launched their “million penguins” collaborative novel. An experiment aimed at enabling anyone to contribute to the writing of a new novel on the Internet. This collaborative effort is based on the successful “wiki” technology that spawned the co-operative wikipedia which we covered in “Brave New World”. The experiment, which Penguin says is the first "wiki novel" to be started from scratch by a major publishing house, will be online for at least six weeks.

"This is an experiment. It may end up like reading a bowl of alphabet spaghetti," Jeremy Ettinghausen, head of digital publishing at Penguin UK said, adding there were no plans as yet to publish the completed work. "We are not making any predictions. It would be utterly fantastic if we could at the end create a print remix."

Penguin states the work is not a talent search.

The “wiki” format works well when the subject matter is factual and the entries are short and their number is many but will it work when there is one story, input is open to all and the subject is pure fiction? Logic says it will fail and editors and authors will be rubbing their hands as their value becomes even more obvious. What is certain is the real winner will be Penguin. They will get publicity whether it fails or succeeds and will get input even if the contributors are not recognized.

Personally, my mind goes back to visualizing those millions of penguins in Antarctica and asking why they put themselves through significant peril just to come ashore in this one place?