Much to our suprise, we learned that Tantek Çelik is no longer with Technorati. We are excited to see what Tantek has up his sleeve, I suspect it is going to be cool! On a side note, the Wikipedia entry to Tantek was updated by Gary King minutes after this news became public. Isn’t Wikipedia great?
Wikipedia is the best known collector of social information. The site is more than six years old and as is known to most users as an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. It is really more than an encyclopedia as an article in the New York Times titled, “All the News That’s Fit to Print Out” explains,
For centuries, an encyclopedia was synonymous with a fixed, archival idea about the retrievability of information from the past. But Wikipedia’s notion of the past has enlarged to include things that haven’t even stopped happening yet. Increasingly, it has become a go-to source not just for reference material but for real-time breaking news — to the point where, following the mass murder at Virginia Tech, one newspaper in Virginia praised Wikipedia as a crucial source of detailed information.
Wikipedia is a representation of information that evolves as our understanding of that information evolves. Interestingly, as Jonathan Dee points out, more than 6.8 million work together to create and edit more than 1.8 million articles. This ‘social information’ is increasingly becoming more and more timely. For the past six years users have been working on competing with existing encyclopedias like Britanica, but now Wikipedia has transcended that traditional model. The internet and the social interaction it allows have created something all together different, and fundamentally better.
Turns out Wikipedia is one of the top ten most visited sites on the web according to Danny Sullivan:
Duncan Riley reported yesterday that the Wikimedia Foundation is insolvent. The Chairwoman of the foundation that runs Wikipedia indicated that the organization would run out of money in three to four months. Of course her goal is to get you to donate money to her foundation, but I think it might be time to rethink how the Wikipedia is funded and controlled.
The current stewards are obviously failing. The fact that Ms. Devouard has run this asset to the brink of insolvency is almost unbelievable. The property is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and yet her team cannot think of a better way to fund the website than begging Lift07 conference attendees for more money.
I propose that the foundation publish its financial situation publicly and then build an all-star board to help turn this ship around. I am certain that together we can come up with a neutral, non-commercial model that will ensure the survival of Wikipedia forever. Duncan suggests, “I smell a begging bluff on this one…” I suspect so, but I think it might be time to stabilize my favorite property on the web.
We have been using wikis in our business as well as promoting the collaboration tool to our clients. The Dallas Mavericks are experimenting with a public wiki for use by fans. The Dallas Observer talked to Mark Cuban about the wiki,
But, then, that is the point. Team owner Mark Cuban tells Unfair Park that MavsWiki is intended “a way for fans to have more fun and connect closer to the Mavs” by posting their fond memories of games way past and recently present. Mavs staffers (meaning, interns) will augment the site with old game stories from the Associated Press and other media outlets. Cuban also says, “I think it’s a first of any kind”; certainly, no other pro sports team has a similar site…at the moment.
Check it out here: Mavswiki.com. The cost of deployment is very low compared with traditional fan sites, and it gives your brand a great opportunity to let your fans generate content. It will be interesting to see if dedicated wikis (versus public wikis like Wikipedia) take off. What do you think?
The founders of the wikipedia claim that most of the work is done by a small group of 500 contributors. This afternoon I ran across an interesting post concerning, “Who writes wikipedia.“ Aaron explains,
When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.
And when you think about it, this makes perfect sense. Writing an encyclopedia is hard. To do anywhere near a decent job, you have to know a great deal of information about an incredibly wide variety of subjects. Writing so much text is difficult, but doing all the background research seems impossible.
On the other hand, everyone has a bunch of obscure things that, for one reason or another, they’ve come to know well. So they share them, clicking the edit link and adding a paragraph or two to Wikipedia. At the same time, a small number of people have become particularly involved in Wikipedia itself, learning its policies and special syntax, and spending their time tweaking the contributions of everybody else.
Other encyclopedias work similarly, just on a much smaller scale: a large group of people write articles on topics they know well, while a small staff formats them into a single work. This second group is clearly very important — it’s thanks to them encyclopedias have a consistent look and tone — but it’s a severe exaggeration to say that they wrote the encyclopedia. One imagines the people running Britannica worry more about their contributors than their formatters.
This explaination makes the most sense to me. How could 500 people know everything? It makes much more sense that tens if not hundreds of thousands of people have something to contribute and an elite group of 500 do most of the formatting. Nice work. . .
Stowe Boyd has an extensive post titled, “Efficiency v Belonging: The Real Heart of Social Tools” where he proposes that many of the critics of social tools are chasing a red herring when they claim social tools do not improve personal productivity. Stowe correctly points out that this “lynch mob” is barking up the wrong tree.
Social tools were never really designed to improve productivity or efficiency (some may in fact do so), but instead he suggests that social tools “are about social involvement, learning and enlarging perspectives through connection…”
My favorite social tools (that don’t save me time) include: Upcoming.org, Wikipedia and Flickr. Why? They help me stay connected. In the case of Yahoo’s Upcoming and Flickr, they help me connect to a small group of people who I care about. In the case of Wikipedia it helps me stay connected to the world. Just ask my wife if adding pictures to Flickr help me save time…
My parents bought us the World Book Encyclopedia when we were kids. I loved browsing through the pages learning about new things. By the time I was ten I think I had read the whole set. Fast forward to today and I am still hooked on the encyclopedia, Jimmy Wales’ internet version called Wikipedia. I use it every week – it is simply the best resource I have found for information on everything. It suprises me how many people have never heard of Wikipedia, much less used it to uncover information. Wikipedia describes itself as:
Wikipedia (IPA: /ËŒwiË?kiË?ˈpiË?di.É™/, or /ËŒwɪkiË?ˈpiË?di.É™/, else /ËŒwɪkɪˈpiË?di.É™/) is an international Web-based free-content encyclopedia project. It exists as a wiki, a website that allows visitors to edit its content. The word Wikipedia itself is a portmanteau of the words wiki and encyclopedia. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing most articles to be changed by anyone with access to the website. Wikipedia’s main servers are in Tampa, Florida, with additional servers in Amsterdam and Seoul.
The best part of Wikipedia is YOUR ability to add information to the system. If you are an expert on a subject you can add your knowledge to the wiki, don’t worry the community will keep you honest (if you make a mistake they someone else will edit it for you).
