Vogue Encyclo Is Looking for Contributors

Vogue.ItThe Vogue Encyclo landing page.

Want to pitch a story idea to Vogue Italia?  Earlier this month, the venerable magazine started Vogue Encyclo, a kind of online fashion encyclopedia that invites users to contribute articles on fashion, designers, cinema and other topics, much like a wiki.  Vogue Italia editors will vet and assign ideas, with articles published on Vogue Encyclo with the user’s byline.

“We fact-check everything just to make sure things are written in the right way,” said Alice Furnari, the editorial coordinator of Vogue.it, who worked closely with Franca Sozzani, the editor in chief of Italian Vogue, to develop the site. “Not only substantially, but style-wise. So we tend to leave the writers’ own style, but we edit them in line with our style.”

Wikifashion.ComWikifashion.com.

Crowd-sourcing is not a new phenomenon among fashion sites.  FashionStake.com, SocialAttire.com and Modcloth.com invite users to pick which garment designs get produced. And Wikifashion, which was started in 2009 by Madeline Veenstra and Coen Hyde, allows users to submit and edit articles on numerous fashion topics, including individual designers, magazine editors, models and photographers.  “Our content is not edited by an editorial board,” Ms. Veenstra said. “We work the same way as Wikipedia does by allowing our community to take care of the editing process.”

But Vogue Encyclo is the rare fashion magazine to pull back its editorial curtain, for a more democratic approach to generating articles and photos. It also has the imprimatur of Vogue Italia and a built-in audience of about 1.5 million unique monthly visitors. “We surely want to give these people credibility,” Ms. Furnari said. ”I think it’s important,” she added, “for people who love fashion, who maybe want to become fashion journalists.”

Vogue.It

(Vogue Encyclo is not to be confused with Voguepedia, a site created by the staff of American Vogue this spring, that indexes the magazine’s 120-year archive into curated topic pages.)

This is not Vogue Italia’s first foray into user-generated content. The main site has a Photo Vogue section that allows users to submit their own fashion editorial. More than 13,000 users  from divergent backgrounds have uploaded images, including lawyers with a passion for photography, young hobbyists and professionals testing new techniques.

Over the summer, Ms. Sozzani put a call out for “theme” submissions. More than 300 stories ideas were submitted this summer. “There’s a lot to work with, so we started with 100 and post 2 a day, Monday through Friday,” Ms. Furnari said. They’ve received about another 100 ideas since.