By Emily Murphy The Independent - London
05/14/08 8:52 AM PT
Based on the philosophy that anonymity is a barrier to reliability, the French encyclopedia Larousse is launching an online rival to Wikipedia. Though the company is actively seeking to build a large community of contributors, it will not allow the same level of free-wheeling collaboration that is characteristic of Wikipedia. Articles will be signed by authors, and they'll be protected from alteration.
Reward Yourself – Try Sugar 5.0 Today Sign up for a 30-day complimentary Sugar Professional On-Demand trial. Take control of your business: customer relationships, group collaboration, sales forecasts, customer support and marketing management. Start your trial now.
France has long battled against the Anglophone cultural invasion, and now it has thrown down a virtual gauntlet. Larousse, the French encyclopedia created more than 150 years ago, is launching its own -- it would say improved -- version of Wikipedia.
Its first, free-access, online encyclopedia will have the same contributor function, but to try to surmount the inherent problem of unreliability of articles that can be modified by anyone at any time, Larousse has introduced some constraints.
Users who want to contribute have to sign up, and their names will then appear on the article they submit. Unlike on Wikipedia, anonymous contributions are not allowed -- and, once written, contributions become protected.
Volunteer Armies
Alongside the user-written pieces, Larousse will be making available 150,000 articles from its universal encyclopedia, plus 10,000 images.
Larousse is promising more in the future, along with the inclusion later this year of hundreds of video clips from channels such as National Geographic.
The Wikipedia community is made up of nearly 390,000 volunteer contributors, and Larousse sees them as one of the vital ingredients in its success.
It is hoping to rival Wikipedia with its own online community and is drawing on its long-established print reputation to encourage people to join in.
Different Strokes
"By becoming a contributor to Larousse, you become associated with a publisher of prestige, recognized for the seriousness and reliability of its content," says Isabelle Jeuge-Maynart, Larousse's managing director. "Respect for an author is central to our concept. That should reassure ... experts who are at the moment hesitant to publish their work on the Internet."
As for Wikipedia, it appears to be moving in the reverse direction. A print version of the encyclopedia, featuring 250,000 of its 10 million online articles, is set for publication in September by the German media group Bertelsmann.
.
Talkback: 