“It’s not about broadcast, it’s about interaction” 15 Mar 2005
25 comments Latest by GO77
Wikipedia, a site run by volunteers, has more traffic than Paypal or USAToday.com. Mark Hurst interviews Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales over at Good Experience.
I was recently on a panel with the head of USAToday.com. He said they have 300 million pageviews a month. I said that’s good; we have 400 million. Then he said he had 180 people on staff. I said I have one part-time person who helps me with the servers. There’s something new going on here. It’s not about broadcast, it’s about interaction.
Wales also claims that tampered pages are usually corrected in under five minutes.
…the vast majority of changes on Wikipedia are made from a hard-core group of users. It’s not a Darwinian phenomenon of millions of people, but rather a community of people. That core group is in constant communication, via IRC, and on the Web itself - they’re always talking, in 40 languages, about the articles. That’s how the site gets corrected so fast. People notice the change and very quickly communicate it through the community.
25 comments (comments are closed)
Darrel 15 Mar 05
Wikipedia is an amazing site. I always end up spending WAY more time than I had intended whenever I follow a link to it.
Ryan Powers 15 Mar 05
I think what makes wikipedia so brillient is that it allows those with a passion for a subject to share that passion. Instead of relying on paid, bored, editors to update a wide range of subjects, they allow those with an intense passion to do a very fine job of sharing that passion…
Randy 15 Mar 05
But… Can anyway cite Wikipedia as a legit source? If not, what good is it? If you can’t cite it as reliable, why do you think it’s actually reliable for your own needs?
Paul 15 Mar 05
Wikipedia is amazing. Every time I add dirty words they’re gone almost INSTANTLY!
Jordan T. Cox 15 Mar 05
Regarding citations; I love wikipedia because it’s educational. Finding a discreet bit of info from a book for academic citations is easy; finding a meandering trail of juicy tidbits of learning (that may ultimately lead down a brand new path of research) is something that an academic text book rarely does. So you’re learning about cell biology, but here’s this cool link to how carrots reproduce on a cellular level. It’s an entire article, not just a tiny sidebar. From there you can jut off in five directions, and so forth. That’s what /I/ like about wikipedia.
Micah McDougal 15 Mar 05
Wikipedia is the power of the cyberage… incarnate. It is as close to being a living, breathing cyberanimal as the T-2000 was in T2. Could this be the prophetic Skynet of our century? Ask the Oracle, ask the MCP cone… Only time will tell my friends.
Dan Boland 15 Mar 05
This is the first time I’ve ever actually visited Wikipedia, it definitely seems like a cool website. But I wish that there was some sort of mouseover effect on the links… Yeah, I’m picky, but you can’t help pet peeves.
Dave Woodward 15 Mar 05
Randy: WikiPedia is a legit source. It is the same information you can find in reference books, except that it is updated and corrected in real time instead of having to wait for the next edition of a book.
The reason why most people don’t see it as legit is because no one person is accountable for the information if it is wrong. It is the information from society itself, not from one specific (possibly biased & filtered) source. For some reason this freaks people out that the information is non-permanent. Why does permanence equate to the integrity of information?
Jake 15 Mar 05
ROFL @ “Wikipedia is amazing. Every time I add dirty words they’re gone almost INSTANTLY!” And how often are you doing this?
WikiPedia is awesome!
Jeff Koke 15 Mar 05
Most of the information that you find on Wikipedia can be verified through another source, so I don’t think legitimacy is much of an issue. It’s a great central repository of useful information.
Darrel 15 Mar 05
“Can anyway cite Wikipedia as a legit source?”
I don’t think I’d cite USAToday as anymore of a legit source.
John Zeratsky 16 Mar 05
Folks like the USA Today should be encouraging interaction on their site, too — but they see it as a threat, not an advantage.
kira 23 Mar 05
Wikipedia also gets all those visits because of the amazing breadth of content they have — the sheer number of search topics that have a wikipedia page as a plausible result has to dwarf the comparable number for any news site.
I’d bet their volume has more to do with breadth than interactivity.
Kyle 13 May 05
Wow, I cannot believe I have not been to this site before.
WIKIPEDIA IS TRULY GLORIOUS!
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