Many organizations then started placing high hopes that all their knowledge management woes would have found their savior. If Wikipedia can be as good as Britannica, we could replace all our outdated corporate knowledge repositories with wikis. The wisdom of crowds would run its magic, and we’d have high quality and up-to-date content we can rely upon.
Image by Octavio Rojas via Flickr
Six years later, we can safely say that the predicted wiki utopia never materialized. Was that just a collective hallucination caused by too many consultants who drank a lot of the Kool-Aid 2.0? How come that Wikipedia is even more successful today than back then (6th most accessed site worldwide), but a good chunk of our corporate wikis are moribund and abandoned, with content that’s often worse than the ones created by our decades-old, expert-based, top-down traditional processes? Was Wikipedia just the exception that proved the rule? Is the Britannica model really outdated? Keep reading, and you may find that the actual answer is a bit of the above, but with a significant twist.
Before showing any numbers to show the success of Wikipedia, just take a look at Wikistream, an impressive visualization of what’s happening in Wikipedia right now. Here’s a snapshot as a teaser, but I highly recommend you to click in the link above for the real deal:
As you can see, at any given moment there is an incredible number of editors frantically updating Wikipedia. Thus, it’s no wonder that enough of interesting and high-quality content is produced to convince more than 400 million unique people to visit it every month. Here’s Google’s estimate on the number of monthly visitors for the top sites on the web (excluding themselves):
Now, take a look at this second stat: in the English version of Wikipedia, you have approximately 23 editors (generously defined as people with 5 or more contributions) per million speakers (1.5 billion, counting the ones with English as a second language). If I did the math right, that means approximately 35,000 editors who contributed to almost 4 million articles there.
Image by Octavio Rojas via Flickr
Six years later, we can safely say that the predicted wiki utopia never materialized. Was that just a collective hallucination caused by too many consultants who drank a lot of the Kool-Aid 2.0? How come that Wikipedia is even more successful today than back then (6th most accessed site worldwide), but a good chunk of our corporate wikis are moribund and abandoned, with content that’s often worse than the ones created by our decades-old, expert-based, top-down traditional processes? Was Wikipedia just the exception that proved the rule? Is the Britannica model really outdated? Keep reading, and you may find that the actual answer is a bit of the above, but with a significant twist.
Before showing any numbers to show the success of Wikipedia, just take a look at Wikistream, an impressive visualization of what’s happening in Wikipedia right now. Here’s a snapshot as a teaser, but I highly recommend you to click in the link above for the real deal:
As you can see, at any given moment there is an incredible number of editors frantically updating Wikipedia. Thus, it’s no wonder that enough of interesting and high-quality content is produced to convince more than 400 million unique people to visit it every month. Here’s Google’s estimate on the number of monthly visitors for the top sites on the web (excluding themselves):
Now, take a look at this second stat: in the English version of Wikipedia, you have approximately 23 editors (generously defined as people with 5 or more contributions) per million speakers (1.5 billion, counting the ones with English as a second language). If I did the math right, that means approximately 35,000 editors who contributed to almost 4 million articles there.
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