With the growth of Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica has decided that it’s time to join the revolution. Yesterday Jorge Cauz, President of Encyclopedia Britannica, announced that within the next 24 hours users would be able to modify and contribute to the online version of the encyclopedia.

In an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald, Mr Cauz said that the enhancements were in their first stages of development. He also said that the reputation of Britannica as a world leading encyclopedia would remain intact as any modifications users made would not be made live on the site until a Britannica editor had given them the once over. Despite the extra workload that this could put on editors, Mr Cauz said that Britannica was aiming for a twenty-minute turn around time between readers posting updates and editors either accepting or declining them.

While Wikipedia is almost a free-for-all, in that anyone can join up and edit articles, Britannica will be a lot more stringent with its sign up policy. A real name and address must be given before you can start to edit articles.

Although Britannica is one of the best known encyclopedias in the world, it’s come under increasing pressure from Wikipedia as people shift to online research. Wikipedia has a huge lead in terms of traffic and Mr Cauz has stated that he believes Google is also not helping the cause by favouring Wikipedia articles over Britannica ones in Google searches, despite Britanica having a 241 year history.

According to Alexa ratings, Britannica is ranked 2,753 in terms of visits, while Wikipedia sits in the top 10 at number eight.