Wikipedia
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- Wikipedia: About
- 1995: first wiki
- The beginning: 1999, Wales & Sanger (Nupedia, formal editorial system), 2001 Wikipedia (Hackers, Hits and Chats)
- Similar to Open Source model, some historical connection (The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource), Copyleft license
- crowd sourcing, collaborative knowledge, wisdom of crowds, peer-to-peer distributed content production: "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow ..."
- Key differences with Open Source:
- Focus "compiling all human knowledge" versus designing an operating system
- Leadership model
- Real time updates
- Wikimedia Org, Non Profit. Operating budget, about $35 million (2013)
- No advertising
- Scope
- 470m active users a month (6th site)
- 10 billion page views a month (English version)
- 77,000 active contributors a month
- 31 million articles
- 285 language versions, 9 have more than 1 million articles
- English version has 4.5 million articles
- 3.5k featured articles, 15k good articles
- Notable, factual, verifiable, neutral
- Increasing returns, over time
- Internal culture:
- editors
- administrators
- bureaucrats
- Arbitration committee
- Stewards
- Jimmy Wales
- Scaling issues
- Issues:
- Risks of vandalism, and how they are mitigated
- Sockpuppets editing (Wiki PR)
- Edit wars
- New editors
- Bias issues
- Shift to mobile (editing)?
- Important site: search
- Monopoly
- Web Characterization:
- broader web (working on individual sites)
- social web
- wikipedia (collectively working together "common knowledge")
- Business model ? Free rider effect: editing and $s
- Marketers' use ?