Wandering Soul

Let’s see what makes Wiki so popular. There are many factors in favour of Wiki, but one of the most important is its free nature of content.

The main reason for Wiki’s popularity is the free nature of its content. But it’s a business model, and a business model must bring home it’s two pence in order to survive. If we consider the rare case that it is not a business model, still it will have to generate revenue to pay for the servers, bandwidth, and other infrastructure.

Wiki’s revenue comes in the form of donations from users. They have a separate page where users can donate, even anonymously. And donate they do, generously, because we have seen Wikipedia grow exponentially since it’s launch in July 2002. So the free encyclopaedia runs on donations from users or non-users.

Wikipedia, free of advertisements, and running on donations, is the epitome of web 2.0 and is extremely popular today. As on 31st March 2006, Wikipedia had 1,055,239 articles, as opposed to Britannica’s 120,000 articles. The number of articles in Wikipedia excludes redirects, discussion pages, image description pages, user profile pages, templates, help pages, portals, articles without links to other articles, and pages about Wikipedia. Well, that’s what Wikipedia says.

Users have made 48,052,327 edits, an average of 12.70 per page, since July 2002. That’s a very high number of edits per page if you ask me! Considering the edits can be additions, corrections or outright deletions of facts, the dependability of information on Wikipedia suddenly comes spiralling down. I was a little unnerved by this fact, so I decided to look deeper into Wikipedia’s way of working. I checked out their ‘About Wikipedia‘ page, where I read the following bit:

This website is a wiki, which means that anyone with access to an Internet-connected computer can edit, correct, or improve information throughout the encyclopedia, simply by clicking the edit this page link (with a few minor exceptions such as protected articles).

Any Tom, Dick or Harry can change the articles as they deem fit?! What about accuracy? I decided to read further.

You do not need to fear accidentally damaging Wikipedia when you add or improve information, as other Wikipedeans are always around to advise or correct obvious errors if needed.

But how many out of the 1 million odd articles could be policed by users of Wiki, and further still, how many of these users would be authorities on the respective subjects, is what I want to ask. Fearing the worst, I decided to read on.

In particular, older articles tend to be more comprehensive and balanced, while newer articles may still contain significant misinformation, unencyclopedic content, or vandalism. Users need to be aware of this in order to obtain valid information and avoid misinformation which has been recently added and not yet removed.

Just as I thought! But there has to be a policy in place governing the changes in articles, and who can post these changes. There must be a closed group of people who makes these policies. So I hunted for the policy page of Wikipedia, and this is what I found:

This page is an official policy on the English Wikipedia. It has wide acceptance among editors and is considered a standard that all users should follow. Feel free to edit the page as needed, but please make sure that changes you make to this policy reflect consensus before you make them.

Even the policy page is user generated. Any one can make changes to the policy of Wikipedia as he/she chooses.

So Wikipedia obviously has its own share of troubles. There’s obviously a question of accuracy, but on second thought its not so critical. Why is that? There are two types of users coming to Wiipedia. One is a casual information hunter, and the other is a researcher. The articles browsed by the casual visitor would typically be general information, policed by a high volume of users, and would tend to be more accurate. On the other hand, topics browsed by researchers would be highly technical, not policed by many users. But then these kind of topics would be posted only by users who are quite knowledgeable in those fields.

Hmmm… so lets wait and see what Britannica does to counter the threat from Wikipedia. Will Britannica offer its contents free of cost to everyone, and generate revenue from ads and donations instead? Will Wikipedia impose restrictions on posting and editing of articles, to improve accuracy of information? Only time will tell. The battle of the encylopaedias is just starting…