If you look at the Wikipedia entry for Wikipedia, you'll learn the Internet's encyclopedia turned 13 Wednesday. In that time, the site has become a storehouse of human knowledge, the sixth most-popular site on the Internet and a disruptive force in the knowledge-gathering industry.
Even the venerable Encyclopaedia Britannica, the oldest continually published English language encyclopedia, had to take heed of Wikipedia. Though neither publication talks about themselves as direct competitors, a report comparing the two caused some introspection at Britannica.
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"Britannica didn't come out so great in that comparison," Michael Levy, a former executive editor for Britannica, told Mashable. "It was a shot across the bow. People's morale was low. Also, it was a rallying cry."
Levy (who left Britannica in 2012) started at the publication in 2000, a year before the advent of Wikipedia. After a December 2005 report by the scientific journal Nature, he worked on a team that conducted a "top to bottom review of [Britannica's] procedures and processes" and eventually became an executive editor in charge of implementing the updated editorial procedures.
The Nature report concluded that Wikipedia "comes close" to Britannica in terms of scientific accuracy, despite being written by very different editors. Wikipedia, for the most part, is a crowdsourced publication edited by volunteers. Britannica pays Nobel laureates, preeminent scholars and other people of merit to write articles, which are meticulously edited by a team of professionals.
"It was an extremely rigorous process, but as you can guess, it was really slow," Levy said. "It took an enormous amount of time to make even some of the most minor changes and put them online."
Despite the company's self reflection, Britannica still vehemently disputed the findings of the Nature report. Tom Panelas, director of communications for Britannica, said Nature was "flacking for Wikipedia" by "trying to draw invidious comparisons between it and Britannica." He said the publication found the research "contrived and most of their claims bogus."
Regardless of the veracity of the Nature report, Levy said the comparison with Wikipedia spurred Britannica to move faster. By his estimation, up to 75% of the errors noted in the Nature article would have been corrected if Britannica would have published the backlog of manuscripts it had waiting for review.
It's not like Britannica was late to the digital party, though. Levy said the publication went online in 1994. He pointed to "antiquated" technological procedures and the long editorial process as the problem. He said before the aforementioned procedural review, Britannica pushed out updates once every few weeks instead of allowing editors to tweak digital articles at will.
"We cut down on the number of eyes that had to see something," Levy said. "And what we found was we could reduce the process and speed up the time from beginning to publish without really sacrificing quality."
Levy said Britannica also reacted to the "almost cataclysmic events of Britannica in 2005 and early 2006" by beefing up its editorial staff by about one-third. He credited the company's president, Jorge Cauz, for investing resources.
"[Cauz] understood what Britannica needed to be able to compete, not against Wikipedia, but to compete in the technological age," Levy said.
Even in becoming more nimble, like Wikipedia, both Levy and current Britannica employees maintain that the organizations have different goals.
"What they do is very different from what we do, so they really don’t affect us much," Panelas said. "Our business revolves mainly around education — digital learning programs and solutions for students and teachers. That’s an area where Wikipedia really isn’t present."
Now entering its teenage years, Wikipedia is also looking for ways to continue to expand.
"In a nutshell, our biggest challenge in 2014, the 13th year of Wikipedia, is: How do we continue to grow that community of global editors?" Jay Walsh, a spokesman for Wikipedia's non-profit operator the Wikimedia Foundation, told Mashable. "How do we sustain that growth, and how do we support the people who are editing Wikipedia today?"
Walsh said Wikipedia needs to continue to abate any social, political, bureaucratic and technical barriers that preclude diversity in Wikipedia's volunteer contributors. It's predominantly "educated younger men" running Wikipedia, Walsh noted.
New editors need to not only learn the technical skills to make changes on the site, but also they often must contend with more experienced editors who are protective over the current content.
"The various administrators and editor wars that occur, I think, have really undermined the democratic underpinnings that was really Wikipedia's promise," Levy, the former Britannica editor, said.
In particular, Wikipedia has long struggled to attract female contributors.
"You can't reflect all the world's knowledge and only reflect 15% or 20% of women," Walsh said. "We totally recognize that needs to be addressed."
With more than 30 million articles in 285 languages, Wikipedia seems to be the awkward teenager, sometimes struggling to hide its growing pains. But as the site attempts to come of age, one can't help but wonder what it might turn into if it's around anywhere close to the nearly 250 years Britannica has endured.
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