Web 2.0 Architectures

Britannica Online and Wikipedia

A disruptive technology can do more than cost a business money. Sometimes the disruption extends so deep that the virtues of the business’s past become problems, and techniques that would previously have been vices suddenly become virtues. The emergence of Wikipedia and its overshadowing of the Encyclopedia Britannica is one case where the rules changed decisively in favor of an upstart challenger.

Applicable Web 2.0 Patterns

The collaborative encyclopedia approach ushered in by Wikipedia capitalizes on several Web 2.0 patterns:

• Software as a Service

• Participation-Collaboration

• Rich User Experience

• The Synchronized Web

• Collaborative Tagging

You can find more information on these patterns in Chapter 7.

From a Scholarly to a Collaborative Model

The Encyclopedia Britannica was originally published in 1768 as a three-volume set, emerging from the intellectual churn of Edinburgh. It grew quickly, reaching 21 volumes by 1801, and over the next two centuries, it solidified its reputation as a comprehensive reference to the world. Producing the printed tomes was a complex and expensive enterprise, requiring editors to judge how long to leave an edition in print, how much to change between editions, what new material to cover, and who should cover it.

The possibility of an electronic edition was in many ways a relief at first. The Encyclopedia Britannica took huge strides during the computer revolution to survive a changing world. In the mid-1990s, the static book publisher ...