By Eric Goldman In my last post on Wikipedia, I mentioned that my personal Wikipedia page had been tagged “article…

I think your understanding of wikipedia’s prospects is dependent upon on your theory of human motivation; contributors receive money or esteem they will lose interest. Fortunately not everyone is motivated by money and esteem; other motivations may account for the dedication some wikipedia contributors show towards the project. Wikipedia is a great outlet for folks who love to create order and to organize things. There are Wikipedians who, for example, spend hours fixing grammar and spelling errors; such habits might be annoying in a co-worker or spouse, but are very useful to the wikipedia project.

Also, one of the best ways to learn about a topic is to write about it, so contributing to Wikipedia is a great way to advance one’s own learning — and has a greater chance of actually being read by someone than most school papers. Lastly, at least some people are convinced that human society advances by non-zero-sum interactions between people, and act upon that conviction; projects like Wikipedia may advance the human prospect in ways that linkspamming or blogging never will.

The people who “love to create order and to organize things” are exactly the people I think will check out first if the marketers succeed at creating chaos. No point in rearranging the deck chairs if the ship looks like it is going down.

Eric.

One scenario is that Wikipedia remains a strong and vibrant community but only by eliminating open access elements. This might be measured by diversity/concentration of contributors, but it’s really a policy analysis.

Another scenario is that Wikipedia is overrun by spam and no one is there to fight it. This might be measured by article creation, although the spammers may be in control of that metric. It could be measured by usage statistics (page views, visitors, etc.) although these may be a lagging indicator as Wikipedia has great PR and lots of inbound links. Ultimately, the best metric is the “buzz” factor–are people still talking about Wikipedia as a useful resource, or have they moved on to the next great content delivery platform.

Eric.

Thank you for your thought-provoking essay and bold prediction. To help in assessing your prediction over the years, could you give us a quantitative definition of Wikipedia’s failure?

For example, maybe you could post a graph projecting the number of articles added to Wikipedia every month for the years 2007-2010? That way, we could monitor how your predicted graph diverges (or not) from the actual graph as those numbers appear.

I understand that you’re concerned about the quality of the Wikipedia articles. Perhaps you could also make a graph predicting the number of Wikipedia Featured Articles added every month?

Thanks!

You also raise an interesting point about specialized wikis. Don’t they represent a threat to the mass-market Wikipedia? In other words, as power Wikipedians divert their attention to the specialized wikis, this reduces the attention paid to the main site.

Gabriel, I’m not a Wikipedia editor. Of course, given my points about incentives, I trust that’s not surprising!

Eric.

Have a nice day.

Marc, thanks for the comments. I disagree with #2. Marketers will gather where ever consumers are paying attention, even if the promotion is off-topic. So as Wikipedia’s success grows, the marketer interest will too.

I’m interested in your #3-4–what kind of blowback do you contemplate? Note that some blowback might create some legal risks for the blowbackers.

WRT #5-6, Wikipedia may already have some legal protection from automated attacks (common law trespass to chattels, the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act, etc.). But I don’t know how we could regulate the *substance* of contributions. Ultimately, I think that job falls on Wikipedia’s editors.

Eric.

At Centiare, businesses and individuals will be encouraged to “take ownership” of their own articles (with protected status of these Directory pages), write from an “advocate point of view”, and maximize the features of semantic tagging. Sorry to sound like an evangelist, but it’s everything that Wikipedia would offer free enterprise, if only Wikipedia were pro-business.

You may be right that Wikipedia will become a domain only of reliable Pokemon, Star Trek, and pornstar fan-cruft, and not much else. At least businesses will have another option with Centiare.