At our June conference in Boston, CEO and founder of Legal OnRamp Paul Lippe started his presentation with a little pop quiz. Without stealing too much of his thunder, I thought I’d post one of the more interesting questions from his deck:

“Name a comprehensive information resource, written by random people and commentators all over the world (the #1 contributor was condemned as insane), that is only distributed online?”

Click through to find out the answer.

Many of you might have guessed Wikipedia – the correct answer is The Oxford English Dictionary (OED). However, there are striking similarities between the two. Both used mass collaboration to amass millions of submissions, albeit mass collaboration was a lot different back in the late 1800’s when the Dictionary was being written.

The OED project started in 1858 and was completed (i.e. the first edition printed) in 1928 – in total, a seventy-year project. During the height of the collaborative process, over 800 volunteers were submitting 1,000 quotation slips by mail on a daily basis, and by 1882, there were more than 3,500,000 submissions.

Interesting factoid: the number-one contributor, Dr. W.C. Minor, was a convicted murderer and spent the better part of his life in a lunatic asylum. I just recently finished an excellent book on the topic, “The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of The Oxford English Dictionary.”

In 1928, the entire First Edition of the OED was available as a set of 20 half-volumes. The price was 50 or 55 guineas (£52s or £57) depending on the format and binding. The dictionary covered 414,825 words backed by five million quotations, of which some two million were actually printed in the dictionary text. The OED’s latest (and last) print edition (Second Edition) was printed in 1989 and can currently be bought for £450 (note, the inflation-adjusted price means the dictionary costs about the same now as it did in 1928). From this point on, all updates and revisions are strictly available online.

By comparison, Wikipedia is a free resource. Started in 2001, it already has over 75,000 active contributors and as of today, there are 2,528,983 articles in English. If you were to plot the influence of technology on mass collaboration, the difference between the OED and Wikipedia would look something like this: