Edit Articles in Encarta

April 9th, 2005

During my presentation on social networks this week, the topic of reliability and Wikipedia came up. One of the attendees mentioned that she’d rather use World Book over Wikipedia. While I agreed that I might do the same (I wasn’t really sure - I’ve been away from reference work for a while), I asked her if she thought that World Book was 100% reliable. She replied that she would hope that it was. I asked if she had seen the article that appeared in the beginning of the year from the BBC about a 12 year old student who found 5 errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica. She hadn’t. My point: Don’t trust anything 100% and back up your work with other resources. Wikipedia should be seen as any other online resource: with skepticism.

Which brings me to a post that I saw on Threadwatch which mentioned that users of MSN Encarta will be able to edit articles. Not as open as Wikipedia though. From an information page:

“After you submit an edited article, it goes through several steps. First, a researcher verifies the accuracy of the suggested changes. Then an editor reviews the article for issues such as readability and organization. Finally, the proofreading staff makes sure the article adheres to Encarta style.”

I like this approach. It brings the collective intelligence of the users together with the “traditional” encyclopedia. The edits can come from anyone, but the Enacrta editors have final say. Now a question: Who edits the editors?

Comments are closed.