April 9th, 2009
Received this email April 4th:
Britannica Online Subscription
Dear Thad McIlroy,
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online has just introduced a new program that makes it possible for you as a reader and subscriber to contribute edits, revisions, and suggestions to the encyclopedia.
It also gives you credit, by name, for any contribution you submit that’s accepted by our editors for publication. Does this mean you can now become a named contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica?
Yes.
Suggest Edit
To see how it works just go to any Britannica article at www.britannica.com.. For illustration purposes we have a close-up of the navigation bar atop our entry on nanotechnology. Notice that above the title of the article is a button reading “Suggest Edit”.
Click there and you’ll get a version of the article in which you can edit the text as you see fit. You’ll see a toolbar at the top of the article that allows you to copy, paste, or undo what you have done, and format your edits in a variety of ways, much as you would with conventional word processing software. You can also preview the changes you’ve made before submitting them to our editors.
Comment
Also on the navigation bar above the article title is a button marked Comment. This enables you to send an e-mail to our editors with your thoughts and comments on the article. Use this if you have general suggestions and don’t wish to make specific text edits. You may also use this feature in conjunction with the Suggest Edit feature, say, to explain the reason for the edits you’ve made, to recommend other sources for the article, and so on.
In either case, as soon as you submit your suggestions they will go right to a Britannica editor who will review them promptly. If your suggestions are accepted and published, your name will be added to that article’s Topic History, which you can also access with a button above the article title.
These features are new, and they’re labeled “beta,” but they’re working well, and as a member of our WebShare program we would like to invite you to be among the first to use them.
By the way, as you may have seen, these new features are part of a larger plan Britannica has to make our site a virtual community with a host of benefits both for our expert contributors and readers. Among other things, you’ll be able to set up your own profile at our site, publish your own work and become a “friend” of Britannica articles in which you have an interest. Discussions of this are here and here. Please stay tuned.
I invite you to try our editing system on any Britannica article you think can be improved or is in need of correction. We’d welcome any questions or comments you have. Please send them to j.c.miller@eb.com.
Sincerely,
J.C. Miller
Too little, too late?