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Venerable encylopedia seeks just the facts

Board named in hope of trumping online competitors

CHICAGO -- Their predecessors have included the likes of Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, and George Bernard Shaw, and as those luminaries once did, they will determine the scope of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, that venerable source of facts about the world.

To respond to competitive challenges from Google, Yahoo, and the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia, Britannica today will announce it is returning to an old practice after a lapse of a decade by naming an advisory board, whose 15 members top editor Dale Hoiberg calls ''some of the smartest people on earth." The Chicago-based publisher hopes that the prestige and knowledge of the members -- four Nobel laureates and two Pulitzer Prize winners among them -- will help reassert the authority of an encyclopedia first published in 1768 but buffeted in an age when the Internet has loosened the definition of what is factual.

Librarians, teachers, and scholars say they are increasingly alarmed at the way students pull information from anywhere online and accept it as valid, without much consideration of the source. Wikipedia, for instance, allows anyone to make entries and yet draws 5 million visitors a month.

''You can't do something so authoritative easily. It's hard work," said Hoiberg, a Britannica senior vice president.

To help with that work, Britannica has tapped a diverse mix of top-notch advisers who also add some global marketing appeal, with board members from every inhabited continent except Australia. David Baltimore, president of Cal Tech, is a former MIT researcher who shared a Nobel for medicine in 1975 for work that later advanced the understanding of AIDS. Amartya Sen, a Harvard professor born in India, received his 1998 Nobel in economics for studies on how to alleviate poverty. Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian, was the laureate in literature in 1986. Murray Gell-Mann, who earned his doctorate from MIT at 22, was the physics Nobel recipient in 1969.

The new board will meet twice a year to plot the direction for Britannica and fine-tune its editorial content of about 40 million words. Staff editors will pick through the words, tune the tone, and check the facts, but the board will have the heady task of deciding what gets in or not.

''We're deciding what people are going to think," said Wendy Doniger, a professor in the University of Chicago's Divinity School and the only member to have also served on the previous board, which had its last meeting in 1995.

Doniger is one of three women on the new panel, a clear departure from the all-male boards of past generations. There is more of a racial and ethnic mix, too, with Sen, Soyinka, former president Rosalia Arteaga of Ecuador, Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid, and Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and former president of Brown University. He was born in Iran.

''The world has changed," Doniger said. ''There has to be far more attention to the Third World, to women, to alternative political groups, to alternative literature, and things and ideas that weren't covered by the old Britannica, which was a white male thing."

The old board, according to Doniger, began to lose its influence during a battle over whether or how to put the encyclopedia online about the time that Microsoft was unveiling its Encarta collection. The online edition debuted in 1994, but ''there was a parting of the ways" with former Britannica boss Mortimer Adler, who retired in 1995, Doniger said. ''We simply never got an invite to a next meeting."

In 1996, the company was sold, and some academics worried that it had lost its way. Hoiberg disputed that. He noted that each of the 15 official editions was continually revised, and new content added every couple of years. A DVD version was updated annually, and the online version was continually tweaked to stay current. ''We never lost the scholarship," Hoiberg said.

He pointed to a massive project begun in the late 1990s to review every word in Britannica's collection. Consultants, specialists, and editors from a wide range of fields pored over the content. ''An encyclopedia isn't just a conglomeration of everything that anyone can think of putting in there," Hoiberg said. ''Rather, it's a work that has a lot of selection."

The undertaking gave impetus to the idea of resurrecting the advisory board. Benjamin M. Friedman, a Harvard economist who will serve on the board, said: ''There will continue to be a role for authoritative, well-designed, responsive, and creative information, even more so in the digital age. The idea that the encyclopedia is a book sitting on a shelf is outdated."

Britannica has an online edition, which costs $65 a year, a DVD for $70, and the classic bound volumes for $1,650.

Wikipedia, launched on the Internet in 2001, bills itself as ''the free encyclopedia" that ''anyone can edit." Jimmy Wales, a founder of Wikipedia, contended that it has an advantage because he said it has access to any specialist in the world, while Britannica has a set group of editors and, now, advisers. ''The number of experts that they can bring to bear on an issue or topic is a fraction of what we can do, so it's difficult for them to match us in depth, breadth, and quality," he said.

But Wales conceded the pitfalls of allowing anyone to insert content, which could be inflammatory or erroneous. The site, while vetted by specialists, is live. Wikipedia plans to introduce a new product soon that will try to fix that hole, he said.

It is such uncertainty about the accuracy of Web-based information that troubles many traditionalists. ''I think it would be impossible to find a librarian, or even a teacher, in the country that's not concerned," said Jo Sommers, head librarian at The Latin School of Chicago, an elite private school. ''The kids, they gravitate to the Googles, and they don't understand the issue of going to sources that are authoritative, sources that have been vetted. They just assume that everything they find on the Internet is right."

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