In the mid-1980s, when I worked for Mattel, I got a bug up my ass about including an article by a celebrity writer in my quarterly magazine, which went to employees, investors, key customers, partners, suppliers and other audiences. At first, I reached out to Erma Bombeck; I just loved the idea of her writing about vacuuming up Barbie shoes. She was too busy, according to her agent, so I next tried Ray Bradbury. Bradbury was a big fan of the company, having taken a tour several years earlier, and he agreed to do it.

The article Bradbury wrote was great. I was, however, surprised to find that it needed editing. But then I recalled what Ken Estes had told me. Ken, who had been my boss at my first communications job at ARCO, was one of the best editors I’ve ever known. He was a master of the red pen (actually just a plain No. 2 pencil). Ken’s markups could look daunting on your original copy, but damned if the resulting story, while vastly improved, didn’t still read just like my style of writing. I remarked on this to him once, and he replied, “There isn’t a writer alive who can’t benefit from editing.”

The value of a good editor also reminds me that Thomas Wolfe‘s novel, “Look Homeward, Angel”—one of my favorites as a youth—is one-quarter the length of the the original manuscript, thanks to the brilliant editing job by Maxwell Perkins.

When I hear predictions of mainstream media’s demise, it is the notion that everything written by anybody will be published without benefit of editing that disturbs me the most. It’s not that I’m opposed to consumer-generated media; nobody edits this blog. I read several blogs that are written by people who would never get hired as writers, but the quality of their ideas renders the poor writing tolerable.

So I remain a vocal advocate of social media and CGM. It’s just the idea that there won’t be any content that benefits from editing that depresses me. Until that is, I remember that it isn’t going to happen. CGM and mainstream media are going to co-exist. There may be less mainstream media (as evidenced by further rounds of layoffs at metropolitan newspapers), but it won’t go away. People will always want and need content that has been made more readable.

Reviewing some posts written about initial social media moves by my client, Encyclopaedia Britannica, raised the whole notion of edited vs. raw content in my mind. A number of bloggers reporting on the Webshare initiative called it “too little too late” and insisted that, in order to survive in the era of social computing, Britannica would have to move to a wiki model.

Most of the pro-Wikipedia/anti-Britannica screeds point to evidence (which is suspect anyway) that Wikipedia is as accurate as Britannica. But there’s more than accuracy involved in Britannica’s model. Readability is one of Britannica’s goals in having an editor review articles. That’s a big deal.

I’m a Wikipedia fan. I can’t remember the last time I went an entire day without using Wikipedia. However, I have frequently found myself re-reading articles multiple times trying to comprehend them. The Wikipedia model—community editing—is based on Jimmy Wales’ concept of “neutrality” (explained elegantly by David Weinberger in his brilliant book, “Everything is Miscellaneous”). People with diverging views on a subject engaged in tweaking a Wikipedia article can reach a point where they’re satisifed with it and make no more changes. When nobody revises the article further, it has achieved neutrality.

But neutrality and readability are two vastly different things; neutrality doesn’t make an article inherently understandable. That’s what an editor does.

I was discussing this with a friend who pointed me to an article appearing in The Chronicle of Higher Education written by Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University. “I can tell when my students have consulted Wikipedia when writing their papers,” he writes. “Sentences lose their singularity, transitions go flat, diction pales. The discourse sounds like information issuing from a neutral platform, not interpretation coming from an angle of vision.”

Bauerlein offers an example: Entries about Moby-Dick from Wikipedia, Colliers Encyclopedia, Encyclopedia Americana, and Cliffs Notes. “Each one is more vibrant and entertaining than the Wikipedia entry. The information is no better, and Wikipedia is, indeed, a marvelous source for a quick date, fact, definition, event. But in style, most entries are deadening.”

Baurlein doesn’t come right out and say so, but the difference between Wikipedia and the other entries is that expert writers penned the entries for Colliers, Americana, and Cliffs, after which editors worked their magic. For Wikipedia, there is no requirement that authors be good writers, and no professional editor touches the copy.

As Bauerlein notes, Wikipedia has its place as a reference for information, and in particular for entries you can’t find in any other encyclopedia (like the Klingon language, for instance). But professionally produced encyclopedias also have their place and will survive—even thrive—nicely alongside Wikipedia. Ultimately the idea that Britannica must go the wiki route to survive is pure nonsense.