A new program by the Oxford University Press attempts to take the Wikipedia model–hyperlinked repositories of information–and inject it with the thing that has been most elusive to Wikipedia so far: certifiable accuracy.
ArsTechnica reports that OUP has launched Oxford Bibliographies Online in a beta phase, with only four categories: Classics, Islamic Studies, Social Work and Criminology. From the article: “But OUP has plans to add 10-12 new subject areas (known as modules) within the next year. Each subject area contains between 50 and 100 individual entries, and that number should grow at the rate of about 50 to 75 entries per year.”
Contrary to Wikipedia’s anyone-can-edit method, OBO’s entries are written by a collection of scholars, all of whom are working in the relevant field. The work is then vetted by a peer review process.
Of course, Wikipedia didn’t just change the way we interact with encyclopedias; it offered the information for free. And that’s the other key difference in OBO: It’s $29.95 a month or $295.00 a year. So does this solve the accuracy problem with Wikipedia? Or does it re-introduce another, age-old problem: That only universities and libraries will be able to afford access to this verifiable data?