{"id":2077,"date":"2015-11-01T07:40:48","date_gmt":"2015-11-01T12:40:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digital.hbs.edu\/platform-digit\/submission\/wikpedia-can-the-pioneer-stay-relevant\/"},"modified":"2015-11-01T07:40:48","modified_gmt":"2015-11-01T12:40:48","slug":"wikpedia-can-the-pioneer-stay-relevant","status":"publish","type":"hck-submission","link":"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-digit\/submission\/wikpedia-can-the-pioneer-stay-relevant\/","title":{"rendered":"Wikpedia – can the pioneer stay relevant?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wikipedia, launched in 2001, quickly became the encyclopedia of the online world. The free-content online encyclopedia is now the 7th<\/sup> most visited website according to Alexa Internet\u2019s traffic rank<\/a> (as of August 2015), and its crowd-knowledge model has shown that together humans can build a knowledge platform of impressive scale online, unrivalled by any other knowledge-gathering effort.<\/i><\/b><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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Wikipedia is a portmanteau of the words \u201cwiki\u201d \u2013 a\u00a0website\u00a0that allows\u00a0collaborative\u00a0modification of its content and structure directly from the\u00a0web browser, and \u201cencyclopedia\u201d. Through its collaborative nature (Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia\/database where a large amount of volunteers produce the content for free and can edit existing posts), the website is able to leverage the power of the crowds to cover a vast amount of topics. With ~27 million editors, the English version alone quickly became larger than the Yongle encyclopedia, which was the largest for more than 600 years.<\/p>\n

Wikipedia is perhaps the purest form of collective intelligence: Value is created by having the users create the articles, making them available for free to other users. Contributors to Wikipedia seek to collaboratively identify and publish true facts about the world. This ongoing mission differs from a traditional encyclopedia \u2013 Wikipedia is updated shortly after an event (performing a Wikipedia search after a major global event is quite interesting \u2013 key\u00a0 facts are often updated within minutes by a volunteer). Even though a traditional encyclopedia in theory could do the same online, it would never be able to\u00a0employ the\u00a0necessary human resources to make all the updates on a continuous basis. On Wikipedia, it appears to be at least \u201cone nerd per topic\u201d.<\/p>\n

Wikpedia is changed to a \u201c.org\u201d from a \u201c.com\u201d address to denote its non-commercial nature. Its co-founder Jimmy Wales\u2019 net worth is ~1musd<\/a>, and he is very clear that he does not want to commercial the site through advertisements and other monetization efforts. However, this idealistic policy makes the website dependent on donations from its many users to continue its operations. Furthermore, donations are given only if the website manages to stay relevant and\u00a0Wikipedia faces a number of challenges to stay relevant in a changing online world:<\/p>\n