It is remarkable that a reference site created only in 2001, with a shoestring budget, has so solidly dominated the top of the Google rankings. People visit and come back to Wikipedia because it has proven useful, even if its quality has not been certified in any systematic way.
Wikipedia has been able to leapfrog existing encyclopedias by having a broader range of subjects, a deeper treatment for articles, and faster updates thanks to legions of volunteers filing information as fast as the news happens. But the emergent behavior that drives Wikipedia has a large problem area—coherence. Consistency and congruity across articles is the biggest weakness. The articles for Britney Spears, Madonna, Star Wars, Naruto, Pokemon, science fiction, and computer science are detailed, researched, and top quality. The nature of community expertise and interest has made that the case. Turn to articles about African, Asian, or Middle East history, and it’s often slim pickings. Similarly, articles that should warrant short treatment often grow much longer than is likely warranted by their overall historical or academic significance. Editors are driven by their interest and passion, making the quality and length of articles across subject areas uneven.
Wikipedians have tried to correct this imbalance by driving more editors and efforts to neglected articles. There have been experiments with bounty systems, which pay individuals if they get articles to a certain level, but these have had little success. It is not clear that there is any ready solution to this problem. It may be a fundamental characteristic of wiki production that the problem of coherence will be hard to solve to anyone’s satisfaction.
Wikipedia’s impact on the world has been profound, but one also has to look at the cold, hard reality: It’s become so big and influential that it is now a large technical operation with real-world demands on it and some real challenges to be faced going forward.
The Wikimedia Foundation has handled the oversight of finances and operations since Jimmy Wales founded it in June 2003. The Board of Trustees, which started as three appointees and two members elected from the community, now has the majority of its members coming from the ranks of Wikipedians. It’s with mixed results. While it may be heartening to see a passionate band of volunteers give their time and energy to such noble endeavors, experience has become anissue, with few of the board members steeped in governance, finance, or fund-raising issues with respect to nonprofit organizations.
So far, the foundation has been using twice-a-year fund-raisers to solicit funds for Wikipedia’s projects. The results are impressive given how little work is needed to fill the coffers. From the legions of visitors using PayPal or Money-Bookers donations, hundreds of thousands of dollars have been taken in each fund-raiser from visitors often donating no more than twenty dollars at a time. The budgets for the foundation have been modest so far at under $1 million a year until 2007, so the numbers pair up nicely.
Money raised by the foundation has been largely used to run the infrastructure of Wikipedia—the computer servers, the network connections, and affiliated maintenance costs. For an operation that rivals Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google in the traffic, it is a highly lean and efficient operation.
But 2008 will be a whole new domain. The foundation moved from St. Petersburg, Florida, to San Francisco, California, hired a new executive director, and set its sights on many more staff positions. The budget of $4.6 million is more than a fourfold increase over the previous year’s. The usual method is pulling in roughly $1 million of revenue per fund-raiser, leaving quite a shortfall. It will require more aggressive fund-raising strategies if the foundation is to avoid living from "paycheck to paycheck," and having to seek funds each year simply to make the next budget. Currently there is no endowment fund or investment to sustain the project long-term.
Contrast this to what many consider a close cousin, the Mozilla Foundation, which was also established in 2003. As maintainers of the popular Firefox Web browser and other free software packages, Mozilla has a novel revenue model that rakes in tens of millions of dollars a year. The legend in Silicon Valley is that Mozilla has more money than they know what to do with. How does Mozilla make out so well? The numbers are impressive.
In October 2007, the Mozilla Foundation disclosed that their 2006 revenue was $66,840,850, with ninety full-time employees. Roughly 85 percent of this revenue came from Google, as it is the default option in the Firefox browser search bar. That and a Firefox-branded Google page as the standard home page means Mozilla gets lots of associated advertising and affiliate revenue. When users see the Google search listings resulting from the Firefox start page, any clicks on advertisements also generate revenue for the Mozilla Foundation. Each click on an ad may generate only pennies or even a few dollars. But given the increasing number of Firefox users and how many times one does a search each day, it adds up to a nice sum.
It’s these types of numbers that make Jason Calacanis agitated. A high-energy tech entrepreneur best known as the founder of Weblogs Inc., he is an unabashed fan of Wikipedia. He’s also a fast-talking guru on Internet advertising and revenue, and has been continually trying to prod Wales and Wikimedia’s board to get on a similar type of revenue-generating program. Calacanis thinks there would be "$50,000 in the bank right now like Mozilla if they put up one advertisement on Wikipedia."97
As the bad blood regarding the Spanish Fork has shown, advertising or any on-site revenue-generating scheme on the backs of the community is bound to be a dangerous option, even if only for discussion. It’s questionable whether the Mozilla strategy can be directly mapped over to the Wikipedia experience, as the community and the encyclopedia are so intertwined.
The difference between Firefox and Wikipedia is the amount of community involvement. Firefox’s community is largely made up of users of the browser, as only a small number of people write the Firefox software. By contrast, Wikipedia depends on legions of volunteer editors who feel invested in the product. If they perceive money is made off the sweat of their work, there is a much larger constituency to deal with regarding the use of the funds. And if the community walks, the project will wither and become stale. (Spanish Wikipedia living one year in the doldrums is a stark reminder of that.)
More important to consider is the lifetime horizon for the entire Wikimedia movement.
The euphoria of exponential growth is just now wearing off. Both English and German Wikipedia, the two bellwethers of influence, have entered into a period of slowing growth. It’s only natural—the low-hanging fruit has been picked and both encyclopedias are entering into a maintenance mode, where current events and the long tail of minor topics will be the main areas for new content. The basic human knowledge articles about things like [[Earth]], [[Space]], [[Philosophy]] have all been written, and done quite well.
This is perhaps the biggest challenge for the project overall. One cannot have blind faith that Wikipedia will be ever increasing in size, quality, and community. There have been significant examples of articles backsliding from featured status into something less readable and reliable than before. The idea of "flagged revisions" of articles to note their quality was launched by the Germans in 2008,more than a year after it was slated to go live. There is some trepidation about introducing a new feature to a fickle community that may revolt if it is not done right the first time around. Wikipedia has also slowly morphed away from its freewheeling wiki roots as a general writing space. With protection, semi-protection, and flagged revisions, it has become a more regimented system, specifically for the task of writing structured encyclopedia articles on a large scale.
But the question for this community has always been: Are you here for the wiki-ness or the encyclopedia-ness? The "five pillars" of Wikipedia have as their very first item, "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia," something that people often have to be reminded of, and even pruned back to, when the community engages in too many frivolous MySpace-esque social networking activities.
But if Wikipedia is getting close to some level of being done, then the "community" and "wikiness" can be turned toward other useful endeavors. Wiki-source, Wikibooks, and Wikiversity, for example, are other projects started within the WMF and inspired by Wikipedia. One of the more successful offshoots is Wikimedia Commons, a repository for photos and multimedia that can be shared across all Wikimedia projects. These will no doubt become more important, but it’s not clear if they will garner the same passionate crowds as Wikipedia.
That’s because Wikipedia was the remarkable beneficiary of some very special dynamics and uncanny timing.
By happening to launch at the bottom of the dot-com advertising market, it perhaps benefited from many out-of-work or lightly employed dot-com types. Wiki software had come onto the scene at just the right time, and the task of writing an encyclopedia was perhaps perfectly suited for the software. The wiki software was simple, and provided an easy entree to this malleable community. People universally understood what an encyclopedia consisted of and looked like, and the task was easily modularized into writing articles relatively short in length.
On top of that, both existing dominant encyclopedias were behind paid firewalls, making the environment ripe for a new, free player. Combine the goal of "free content" with veterans of Slashdot, Linux, open source software, and an academic culture, and one can see the fertile ground that nurtured Wikipedia.
However, throughout this topic, we’ve seen that the community is constantly evolving, exhausting old members and attracting a different breed of new volunteers. It is a very special time in the history of human knowledge and the history of Wikipedia. Will the community’s veterans and the foundation be able to capitalize now, at the height of Wikipedia’s potential, to sustain it in the future?
It stands at a crossroads. Will the community and the product hold together long-term? Will sustaining Wikipedia be financially viable? Have the steps been put in place to guarantee that it is around in one, five, or ten years from now?
Wikipedia followed Richard Stallman’s philosophy of being free to distribute and modify, continuing the hacker ethos of sharing information to foster learning and furthering the content. A policy of openness allows anyone to edit and participate, and to see others’ contributions, leading to an international, socially connected network that supports its neutral-point-of-view editing policy. And because it is timely, people now depend on Wikipedia as a historical running log of human endeavors.
With more information available at the fingertips of Internet users, this trustworthy distillation of information into knowledge has become Wikipedia’s currency. It’s not so much technical phenomenon as social phenomenon, which is why, despite its flaws, it has become an overwhelming success that continues to grow, as people discover the usefulness of the site and come back day after day.
