Wikipedia is a free available encyclopaedia funded by public donations and written by thousands of volunteers from all over the world. It was founded by the Wikimedia foundation, which is a non-profitable organization, established by Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger and others, to provide a free encyclopaedia. Volunteered staffs manage everything about Wikipedia. In order to empower the use of information, Wikimedia choose a free licensing model. This means that the information available on Wikipedia can copied and redistributed for commercial and non-commercial reasons.
In 2005, Wikipedia had only a single employee, who is the main software developer. The organization structure is chaotic and unlike any other organization. There are no allocated tasks. Instead, tasks are executed by anyone who wants to pitch in. Several organizations struggle to get things done with a controlled organization structure, while Wikipedia manages to be one of the most visited websites on the Internet. When Wikipedia started making news headlines in 2005, even Web 2.0 guru Andrew McAfee predicted that it is going to break down because he know the limited scalability of online communities. In fact an article about skinheads drew his attention to Wikipedia and to Web 2.0. The important question is how did they manage to be successful?
Top ranked websites by Alexa:
1- Google.com
2- Yahoo.com
3- Facebook.com
4- Youtube.com
5- Live.com
6- Wikipedia.org
7- Blogger.com
8- Msn.com
9- Baidu.com
10- Yahoo.co.jp
Comparing Wikipedia page views to other top ranked websites
Jimmy Wales answered a question about how Wikipedia manages the quality of the content and keep it protected from vandalism and the content from being bias. He said the most important thing is our non-debatable neutral point of view policy, which was set from the beginning of the project. He explained that Wikipedia does not talk about truth or objectivity critic topics. Instead, it provides different opinions and what several parties have said about the topic. The importance of this neutrality is to get a diverse community to work together. However every time a change occurs on a page, it feeds into an IRC channel, RSS and notifies people who added that page to their watch list. These changes then incorporated or deleted. On other occasions, people may start pages with meaningless names or these pages also must be deleted.
Despite the possibility of editing Wikipedia pages without registration, anonymous users contribute only to 18% of the total editing. A very close community does the majority of the edits. This community is constant communication on IRC channels and discuss boards. This tight community is the one who cares about the quality of the site. However, there is still a place for centralized decision making when needed. Jimmy Wales gave an example about a foundation that encouraged its members to vote on the deletion or certain pages. Even though they could not manage to get the majority to delete those page, Jimmy said we will change the rules if we had to keep the content from being bias.
Source:
http://www.wikipedia.org/
Enterprise 2.0 by Andrew McAfee
Popularity: 22% [?]
Loading ...