A Creative Idea Turned into Mess
An Overview of the Basic Idea and Current Situation of Wikipedia
Apr 25, 2009
Wikipedia is based on one of the most brilliant and successful ideas of web 2.0; it was a rapidly growing project in the realms of the internet. These days, it is widely discussed that Wikipedia is not a reliable source (see for example Wikipedia Future and Wikipedia's Credibility).
Furthermore, much concern and worry have also been raised for academic referencing to the Wikipedia contents.
Wikipedia Procedure
The Wiki idea is based on the fact that people have different standpoints, and this provides a great opportunity to analyze the available knowledge in a specified topic comprehensively. Wikipedia has utilized this procedure to cover almost all topics to prepare a comprehensive encyclopedia; thus, the contributors are no longer limited to the experts, but almost all visitors.
For instance, when preparing an encyclopedia article about a local place, the contributor is normally (roughly, in the best case) a local resident, rather than an expert writer. The difference can be clarified by comparing the opinion of a local resident with the comprehensive encyclopedia article about a famous city like New York. It is evident that not all New York residents have a suitable ability to write an encyclopedia article about New York.
Editorial Processing
The idea that ‘a broader authorship results in a more comprehensive writings’ is not new, and many writing media work with guest writers to cover a broader range of topics with more appropriate knowledge. However, this needs more editorial consideration, when working with foreign writers (not resident of the medium).
This is indeed the mistake made by Wikipedia. Although such broad range of topics needed an extremely strong and active group of editors, less attention has been paid to the editorial processing in Wikipedia. Of course, it does not mean that Wikipedia doesn't have active editors, but they have not enough time to review daily changes in numerous pages.
Swimming against the Stream
Wikipedia is one of the few websites without commercial ads. The financial policy of Wikipedia (and all sister projects of Wikimedia) is to run the company only with the public aids via donation. In fact, Wikipedia tries to keep the encyclopedia free of advertisements. It is true that many websites have been overcrowded with ads for more profit, and are indeed a collection of various ads around a small space allocated to the main content.
However, this is not the case for all websites; several leading websites display a reasonable extent of ads (such as the giant online ad providers like Google and Yahoo). In this condition, ads are not annoying, and can also be useful by introducing new commercial items. In addition, advertising is very common in various media like TV, newspapers, magazines, and even scientific publications.
In fact, Wikipedia has sacrificed some great opportunities in favor of the ad-free environment. Wikipedia could have noticeable revenue from ads to hire professional editors to review and even re-write the article modifications in accordance with a general policy.
As a comparative example, about.com with one-ninth of Wikipedia pageviews (according to Alexa) has enough revenue to pay the monthly wages of 750 expert writers (who need to spend more time for writing). By a rough estimate, Wikipedia could hire thousands of full-time professional editors to edit the encyclopedia to meet a standard style.
