What if Brittanica had created their own wiki?
Launching a new wiki, like launching a new blog, is hard work. Simply putting it out there isn't enough.
I've successfully launched two wikis, one at the major corporation at which I work, and one at Bainbridge Graduate Institute. What defines success for a wiki? I define it as the point at which the wiki is self-sustaining. The users of the wiki reach a critical mass, at which point the original founder can go away, and the wiki will continue to be used. (My first wiki, launched in January 2001, is still in active use despite the fact that myself and almost all of the first round of early adoptors have all moved onto other projects.)
Information makes a wiki useful. Usefulness is what brings users back to the wiki over and over again. If the wiki isn't useful (in other words, it doesn't have information in it), the users won't contribute. So this is apparently a catch-22.
This is where the role of a wiki founder comes in. The role of the wiki founder is to seed the wiki with content. When I launched my first wiki, I thought this meant that I would put a few documents in the wiki, and presto - everyone would start using it. Of course, that wasn't enough. Odds are that people in the community of users that you want to attract are already sharing information - even if they're doing it in a disfunctional way. So it's not enough to put a few tidbits in there. You've got to make it compelling.
In our corporate group setting, that meant that I seeded the wiki with a few documents, AND then I continue to take every reuseable piece of information that crossed my email inbox and put it in the wiki too. That meant that when a team member send out build documentation by email in a Word document, I spent the time to put it in the wiki. When another team member started emailing out updates on server configuration, I put that in the wiki. When an updated copy of the build documentation showed up in my inbox again, I updated the information in my wiki. I didn't conjole anyone, I didn't whine about it, I didn't blame anyone. I just keep force feeding the wiki. Each time I did take something sent via email, I'll email back the group with the wiki URL for the documentation. Gradually people learned over the course of a few weeks that anything important was going to be found in the wiki, so that's where they started looking for it first. The early adopters started editing documents on their own, and I walked others through the process one on one. (This was 2001 afterall, and few people understood even the concept of a wiki.)
Over the course of a week, the number of contributors increased from one to about five. Over the course of a month, the number of contributors increased to about a dozen, and we were close to critical mass. The flow of email that was really knowledge base type stuff decreased to a trickle, and over the next month it was necessary only to handhold a few more users through the process of contributor.
Once the content reaches that critical mass that it becomes useful and people are drawn to the wiki to use that content, the founders role changes from force feeder to gardener. You start running into questions of community conventions (do i just change this, or do i comment on it?) and access (how do I find what i'm looking for? why is the content organized this way?) But that's a whole separate discussion.
When Mike and I were talking over this process of seeding a wiki, we had a real interesting revelation. What if the folks at Encyclopedia Brittanica had been observing Wikipedia more closely? What if they could have seen the future, and decided to start their own wiki encyclopedia. What if, back when Wikipedia was in its infancy and had only 5,000 or 10,000 articles, Encyclopedia Brittanica had started a wiki encyclopedia and seeded it with their whole library of 40,000 articles? Encyclopedia Brittanica would then have had more content, and therefore would have been more useful than Wikipedia, and therefore attracted more users and more contributions to their own wiki encyclopedia.
This intellectual exercise suggests that organizations that are contemplating Web 2.0 type community projects, and whom have assets in the form of closed knowledge bases can use those knowledge bases to seed wikis, creating an instantly useful source of information. This instant content/usefulness is a strong force for attracting a community of involved participants, one of the single most important criteria to the success of a wiki.