The New Encyclopedia Salesmen

Industry Standard, The, Nov 27, 2000 by Mark Frauenfelder

A fresh crop of Internet-based encyclopedias hope to harness the best information sources on the Net: Know-it-all users.

IN 1978 DOUGLAS ADAMS WROTE A HIT radio play for the BBC called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Its title came from a gadget described in the story as "a sort of electronic book" that "tells you everything you need to know about anything." In today's techspeak it would be called a wireless PDA. The handy electronic guide was updated on the fly by a team of spacefaring researchers and had "supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom."

Adams hopes to bring this fantasy to life with his company, H2g2, which is turning WAP phones into real-world "Hitchhiker's" guides. H2g2 is part of a new breed of Internet encyclopedias that are trying to amass a repository of all-encompassing knowledge by using volunteers. Yet they yield strikingly different products.

Larry Sanger's Nupedia.com attempts to create an "op en content" encyclopedia that will put Britannica to shame. And Everything2, the brainchild of Slashdot co-founder Nathan Oostendorp, strokes the egos of its contributors so they'll build an uncensored database of general knowledge.

These sites appear at a time in the Internet's history when its utopian ideals linger as tenuously as the fun money investors doled out over the past two years. Running on funds earned from successful ventures or obtained before the investment window snapped shut on oddball projects, the new online encyclopedias combine the Web's communitarian past with a strap-on monetization scheme. So far they've secured the grassroots contributors. Now the real challenge is turning fanatical enthusiasm into cash.

THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO EARTH

Adams says he hopes that H2g2 (a U.K.-based company with around $3 million in backing from Arts Alliance, Durlacher and Intel) will become a kind of "information map of the world," An example: You're in Hong Kong and you're hungry. Call up Mobile.h2g2.com on your handheld, it looks up your list of likes and dislikes and displays a short article about a nearby Kublai restaurant, or what to expect when you order roast suckling pig. After the meal, you can fiddle with your phone's tiny keypad to write your own entry for the guide about your experience.

While eclipsing Britannica is a long shot, Adams is not your typical science-fiction novelist. His radio play turned into a string of novels that sold 15 million copies, spawned a TV series and, most important to the success of his project, a fanatical following.

As "head fantasist" of H2g2, Adams has used his celebrity status to rope in nearly 60,000 contributors from 90 countries to write these tourist tips (called "smarticles"). So far, 20,000 people use the company's mobile service each week, says H2g2 CEO Robbie Stamp. A former documentary filmmaker and television producer, Stamp says H2g2 makes money from a combination of e-commerce affiliate deals and banner ad sales. They've also struck a deal with content-provider iSyndicate to license H2g2's articles to other Web sites. But it's not enough to keep the company afloat. H2g2's biggest challenge, according to Stamp, is "looking for the next round of financing."

Adams readily admits that his product isn't quite "ready for prime time." Truly useful PDAs with location-sensing technology, phone service and color screens are "weeks and weeks away," he jokes.

In the meantime, Adams hopes 20 million Hitchhiker's fans will buoy the project. Adams isn't surprised by people's willingness to write for free. "The Net has proved good at fostering a kind of barn-raising spirit," he says.

BRITANNICA BUSTER?

Lawrence Sanger is more interested in bar-raising than barn-raising. As Nupedia.com's recently hired editor in chief, Sanger is overseeing an egg-headed open-source encyclopedia project with "extremely rigorous standards" that will yield what he claims are "articles that are even more in-depth and more scholarly than those in Britannica."

In May 1999 San Diego search-engine company Bomis.com hired Sanger to head up Nupedia, straight from earning his doctorate in philosophy at Ohio State University. Academics -- the first to adopt the Net -- are famously bad at creating winning companies. Nevertheless, with a staff of two employees and occasional assistance from other Bomis programmers, Nupedia has a goal that would make Pollyanna blush: "To set a new standard for breadth, depth, timeliness and lack of bias, and in the fullness of time to become the most comprehensive encyclopedia in the history of humankind."

The clincher is "fullness of time." Applying Nupedia's degree of rigor to writing articles has had the same effect as putting a pinhole-size spigot on a fire hydrant. So far, Nupedia has published only two full-length articles: one on the Classical era of Western music and one on atonal music. "The project is only partially off the ground right now," says Sanger. "But we have 115 articles in the hopper right now. Several dozen have been written and are undergoing the review process and another several dozen have been assigned."