Wikipedia

Earlier today Google announced that Google Knol is now open to the public. Danny Sullivan has an awesome overview of how Google Knol works.

I thought this would be a good time to compare three crowdsourced encyclopedias: Mahalo, Google Knol and Wikipedia. Each one takes a different angle on why you should contribute.

Do you participate in any of these crowdsourced encyclopedias? If so, what factors helped make your decision? Was it to help the "greater good" or was it a financial decision?

Here are some thoughts on each encyclopedia and why people contribute to each:

Wikipedia has announced today that at "Thursday, March 27, at 00:07 UTC" the worldwide article count for all Wikipedias hit 10 million. The 10 millionth article was posted on the Hungarian Wikipedia and is about Nicholas Hilliard, a 16th century English goldsmith and painter. Check out the Hilliard article in Hungarian and in English.

If you are a stats junkie, Wikipedia has an in-depth stats archive for each Wikipedia around the world. English and German are the two most popular languages Wikipedia offers.

Place your bets for the 100 millionth article. Maybe it will be about how we live on Mars.

A friend showed me this really weird look-in on Wikipedia -- could this be the new version of Wikipedia? It's certainly not listed on the "Skin" page inside of the user preferences but it is live. I sure hope it's not as it's pretty ugly and has lost all of the Wikipedia branding. Perhaps it's a lighter mobile version? This is all I have for now - will continue to investigate. If you have any information, please leave it in the comments.

Come inside for the screenshot »

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, sat down in London for an interview with the Online Information 2007 group before the conference in London next week. The full interview is available on Facebook and I've grabbed a couple interesting snippits below.

Where do you see Wikipedia in ten years?
JW: When I think about Wikipedia in ten years I mostly have been focussing my attention on the growth of the languages of the developing world. So I’ve been to South Africa twice this year so far. I’m going again in November and again in March. I’m really trying to promote the growth in the languages of Africa because right now we don’t have a lot of content there. One of the things I look at when I look at long term trends is there’s about a billion people online now and we expect to see another billion coming online in the next 10 years or so. Not from the US or Japan or places like that- we’re already online for the most part. It’s coming from the next stage- South America, India, Africa. All joining the global conversation.

What’s the future of Web 2.0?
JW: I think we’re just at the beginnings of seeing mass participation and collaboration. I think we’re gonna see things we haven’t seen before- especially in music and video. Particularly I think documentary film is an area people could collaborate on.

Finally, any tips for would-be entrepreneurs?
JW: First found a charity that becomes the number nine website on the internet- it just makes starting a for-profit company a lot easier!

Matthew Buckland out of South Africa has an interesting recap of a presentation by Jimmy Wales last evening. In his recap, Matthew wonders if Wales is planning a competitor to Facebook based on the slides that were shown. The slides were supposed to be about a new search product but Buckland saw it another way. He notes, "the screenshot that Wales briefly showed the audience looked very much like a Facebook profile page, than a search page. In fact it looked pretty much identical to a Facebook profile page. Could this mean Wales is developing a social networking, Facebook competitor too? Could it be some kind of search/social networking hybrid?"

With Wikipedia in the Top 10 of all trafficked sites and most likely larger than Facebook worldwide, a social network by Wikipedia could prove a serious competitor. Built on top of the network already in place on Wikipedia.

Matthew also has some interesting facts about Wikipedia:

• Wales said that by the end of 2007 there were now more than 2-million Wikipedia articles in english now, but that this is less than 1/3 of the wikipedia content.
• German and French are two big growing languages with more than 500,000 articles each.
• Wales says that according to Alexa, Wikipedia is now the 8th most popular website in the world.
• Even in countries like Iran, Wikipedia is the 14th most popular site.
• Despite Wikipedia being one of the world’s top ten biggest websites, it only has 10 fulltime positions, with most of the work done by volunteers all around the world.
• Matthew has the rest of the facts shared by Wales.

Wendell Roelf from Reuters was able to grab some time for an interview with Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder during a conference in Cape Town, South Africa. Wikipedia was able to raise $1 million in donations last year and is expected to spend about $3 million in 2007.

I think Jimmy's quote regarding advertising is spot on considering that they are a non-profit company, "When we're turning down millions and millions of dollars in advertising revenue that could be used, to for example, put computers in schools in Africa ... we have to very thoughtful and responsible about why we're doing it."

Wales also spoke about his new search engine expected to compete with Google and Yahoo, "Hopefully it's successful and would provide funding back to Wikipedia." Wendell noted that Wales said last month that Wikia is aiming to take as much as 5 percent of the lucrative Internet search market.

Check out our previous coverage of Wikipedia and the wiki format in general.

At the end of 2006, Time magazine decided that its person of the year was 'You'. Yes, You. All the You's that create and rate content on heavy hitting sites such as MySpace, Wikipedia and YouTube. The reason behind this is that a shift has happened where content isn't generated or rated by experts anymore. Instead it's by everyday folk like you.

This is further back up by a recent Revolution survey showed that within the 16-44 age group:

• 48% have been to a blog site
• 26% have created their own blog
• 74% have rated or reviewed products, content or services

Come inside for a lengthy discussion of Trust including the following:

• You and user generated content
• Trust in Web 1.0
• The problem with user generated content
• Trust 2.0: Ensuring trust in Web 2.0
• Conclusion

Citizendium moves into beta today. Citizendium claims to be a Wikipedia alternative with accountability. The AP has a lengthy article about the site. Marshall wrote about Citizendium back in September when they began the pilot period. The site is created by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger.

My first reaction is that it is butt-ugly. Why not create something with at least some design? If you want to "beat" Wikipedia, step out there and create something that is impactful in its look and usability in addition to the authoritative content.

Marshall noted in Sept, "The defining characteristic of the site is that topic experts will have final, enforceable authority to “resolve” controversy and kick out trolls. Citizendium will be a progressive fork of Wikipedia, allowing its own community to change Wikipedia articles but also offering Wikipedia’s version of those that haven’t been edited in Citizendium. Sanger says the topic experts will function like village elders or college professors - they’ll simply make the wiki a civilized place."

Sanger as quoted in the AP story, "If there's going to be a free encyclopedia, I'd like there to be a better free encyclopedia. It has bothered me that I helped to get a project started, Wikipedia, that people are misusing in this way, and yet the project itself has little chance of radically improving."

A commonly cited peril of Wikipedia's anonymity is vandalism. In the most infamous incident, someone playing a bad joke wrote that journalist John Seigenthaler Sr. had been a suspect in both Kennedy assassinations. The entry lasted for four months of 2005.

Lastly the AP notes, "Citizendium has been operating in a limited manner that ends with this week's official launch. Its volunteer base numbers roughly 900 authors and 200 editors. The site has 1,100 articles, with 11 ``approved'' by editors, meriting them a green check mark. Volunteers can revise any article, though already-approved entries are labeled as separate "drafts'' while they're being rewritten again."

My question is simple... you have Wikipedia with a massive userbase, a mainstream following and excellent SEO. Will Citizendium be able to get these things before they would go bust? Getting the geeks/nerds/techies should be relatively easy. Getting the mainstream, will be significantly more difficult.

I still like Wetpaint for its use of design and style on top of the standard Wiki-style engine.