Wikipedia

Founder Jimmy Wales has created a special thank you note on the Wikimedia Foundation website. He notes, "Since July 1, more than 125,000 of you have donated $4 million. In addition, we’ve received major gifts and foundation support totaling $2 million. This combined revenue will cover our operating expenses for the current fiscal year, ending June 30, 2009." Of course he is willing to accept any additional donations you wish to offer and would place them into a "reserve fund".

Svetlana wonders if $6 million will be enough as the amount needed to keep the site running rises each year. She notes, "But this $6 million budget will not be enough as soon as next year probably as the money Wikipedia consumes is rapidly growing from $3.5 million in 2007 which is almost twice the budget of 2006 as well."

I don’t use Wikipedia much but know many who do so it’s good to see the service continue through 2009.

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

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.

FYI – this is a REAL screenshot – I made it myself inside of Wikipedia.

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

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.

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.

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

You and user generated content

User generated content is one of the key foundations of Web 2.0. (For those of you that haven't heard the hype, Web 2.0 is a term created to define the second phase of the Internet following the dot com crash.) One of the key foundations of Web 2.0 is new functionality that changes content within a page based on what a user does. But let's get back to You – after all, this article is all about You!

First of all who are You and more importantly how can I trust You? In fact the same question applies to me from your perspective. Who am I and more importantly how do you know that anything I write is worth the HTML it's coded in?

Currently there's an avalanche of new content being written on the web. The problem is that it becomes very hard to work out whether the source is accurate and whether the people looking at it know anything at all. So is there anything from web 1.0 that can help us?

Trust in Web 1.0

In the old days (read the 1990's) trust was mostly to do with ecommerce. How could you trust a website enough to either give your personal details or credit card numbers to buy something? A whole set of standards was subsequently developed to ensure users trusted your website.

Some of the key points were to:

• Prove there's a real organisation behind your site (e.g. contact details, about us section)
• Explain what you're going to do with sensitive information
• Provide third party evidence of your credibility (e.g. testimonials)
• Have a professional design
• Regularly update the site so it looks alive and fresh
• Avoid all errors of any kind

But are these guidelines still relevant? Do we need any other guidelines?

The problem with user generated content

In Web 2.0 the issue of trust has moved away from the people that run the site and is now starting to focus more on the people that populate it. People are engaging with each other at a one to one level in so many ways, such as:

• Business (e.g. eBay)
• Pleasure (e.g. MySpace, YouTube, Secondlife)
• Information (e.g. Wikipedia, Digg)
• Classifieds (e.g. Craigslist, Gumtree)

The issue of 'Can I trust this site?' still exists, but the new issue, 'Can I trust the people on it?' is now equally important. The main difference now is that content is being generated by anyone and then being rated by anyone. How can you be sure that what other users write is true?

For example, there's been some controversy about the reliability of articles on Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia. Even more controversy occurred when a guy solicited dates from other men pretending to be a woman on the personals section of Craigslist. He then published all their personal details on the web!

Yet another example is online restaurant guides. How can you trust someone's review when you don't know their tastes? Is the reviewer someone who goes out solely for tasty food or someone who goes out for the atmosphere/occasion?

So, how do we resolve these issues?

Trust 2.0: Ensuring trust in Web 2.0

To ensure site visitors continue to trust your site, you need to ensure users are who they say they are. Ways you can achieve this when users are registering include:

• E-mail an activation link
• Send a text message with an activation code
• Send the activation code to a home or business address

You can also:

• Only allow site visitors access to content/functionality if recommended by a registered user (LinkedIn, the online career network, does this)
• Show people you know their IP address when they're logged in
• Collect users' credit card details

If site visitors know you've validated the credibility of users creating content, they're far more likely to trust that content.

Other ways of increasing trust of user generated content, and enhance the credibility of users, include:

• Make users' profiles publicly available to everyone in the community (the profile can include tastes, expertise or experience, for example)
• Allow users to rate a person for their content, services or products (eBay does this)
• Set up a reference system to highlight respected contributors (Amazon now gives out 'badges' to reviewers, where they get tagged with 'real name' (if the site can verify that it's their real name) or 'top 500 reviewer' (if the site feels the person has given good reviews))
• Have real time face-to-face interaction (e.g. Skype on eBay, Winebit)

You won't of course need (or want) to implement all of these techniques – think about what your site is trying to achieve and the needs of your audience. You should then be able to come up with an appropriate trust strategy.

Conclusion

Guidelines for ensuring trust borne out of Web 1.0 still remain very valid in today's Internet. After all, web users need to be able to trust your website and the content that you've put on there. They also need to trust content generated by other users – follow some of the advice in this article to ensure this!

This article was written by Mark Halabi. He's crazy about web usability and accessibility – so crazy that he's head of client services at usability and accessibility consultancy, Webcredible. He's extremely good at running focus groups and carrying out card sorting sessions.

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.