Wikipedia

The Wall Street Journal reports that while San Francisco-based Wikipedia is the fifth-most popular Web site in the world, the source of its strength -- millions of user/editor/volunteers, who create and edit virtually all the site's content -- are falling away faster than they're signing up.

"That," writes Julia Angwin, "could have significant implications for the brand of democratization that Wikipedia helped to unleash over the Internet -- the empowerment of the amateur."

Recently, these losses have skyrocketed; 49,000 editors dropped from the site over the first quarter of 2009, a tenfold increase over the same period a year earlier. (This while site traffic grew by about 20 percent.) The most essential meaning behind this is that Wikipedia -- which already faces criticism of providing inaccurate, user-inserted information -- has a far smaller base with which to police itself.

Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, dismissed the severity of the situation, telling the Journal that "the purpose of the project is not participation."

This could portend interestingly for news media organizations, who are increasingly turning to crowd-sourcing for content. If Wikipedia -- one of the original large-scale crowd-sourcers, not to mention the biggest -- begins to struggle under the format, media execs looking for a salvation for journalism might have to rethink at least some of their plans.

As for Wikipedia's problems, founder Jimmy Wales told the Journal that his pressing priority is to improve accuracy on the site, which could eventually mean replacing community policing with a mandate for top-editor approval before any changes can be made to content.

So what if that goes against the pure, crowd-sourcing ethos? This is still trial-and-error after all, part of an ongoing, years-long experiment. And whether or not Wales is right, it behooves those in the industry to pay attention.

Wikipedia isn't looking to compete with the media on news, no matter how the Associated Press frames it, Jimmy Wales tells Poynter Online.

The interview asks Wales to respond to the content of an internal AP strategy document leaked this summer, which describes how everyone's favorite collaborative encyclopedia captured a significant amount of traffic following the death of Michael Jackson, and it suggests the AP should create a series of landing pages to steal back page views from Wikipedia.

Poynter asked Wales whether he sees Wikipedia as competing with the AP.

Wales: "Only in the highly attenuated sense that everything on the Internet competes with everything else. We very consciously avoid doing original reporting, and we are very strong in our insistence on linking to original sources."

Poynter: The AP memo says, "The Wikipedia model of standing, authoritative pages could be challenged." What's your reaction to that?

Wales: Sounds like something they should have done years ago. This is the most insightful portion of the document.

More, after the jump, including the background on why the AP sees Wikipedia as a competitor.

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Larry Sanger should be a happy man today.

Larry who? you might ask. Well yes, you see, that's the problem. Sanger's had a long-ranging row with Wikipedia in general and Jimmy Wales in particular about his status as co-founder of the world's largest encyclopedia.

Back up to 2000 for a second. Sanger was hired as editor-in-chief of Nupedia, Wales' first stab at creating an online encyclopedia. Nupedia, however, was written by experts and, as those who follow Wikipedia lore well know, took forever to crank out a tiny number of articles. According to Sanger, Wales wanted something that worked better, so Sanger proposed the Wiki-based model that became the online reference that we all know and love.

Sanger parted ways with Wikipedia in 2002 and since then, has charged the organization and Wales of trying to downplay his role. The issue came to a head earlier this year when he wrote an open letter to Wales, accusing him of leaving Sanger out of the story and taking credit for Sanger's work.

Which is why Sanger should feel validated today. Silicon Alley Insider published a story on Tech's Forgotten Co-Founders, including the likes of Microsoft's Paul Allen and Yahoo's David Filo. And who's front and center in the piece? The good Mr. Sanger.

Photo: Wikiemdia Commons (Creative Commons license)

The parent to Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, the archive of creative commons-licensed images, is about to start hammering out a five-year plan, and it's looking for regular folks—"from the casual reader to active volunteers"—to participate in what it's calling "the biggest, most inclusive open strategic planning process ever."

"Think about all of the amazing things we've accomplished in the last five years alone. Now imagine where we might be five years from now," program manager Eugene Eric Kim writes on the Wikimedia blog. "We are asking everyone and anyone who cares about the future of Wikimedia to help collaboratively develop and write a five year strategic plan for the entire movement."

HuffPo's new Technology section has launched not with a whimper but a bang.

In a post in the section, which started today, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales takes aim at recent mainstream media coverage of Wikipedia, including stories about the new editorial controls it's introducing, basically calling "old media" a bunch of myopic luddites:

I believe that the underlying facts about the Wikipedia phenomenon—that the general public is actually intelligent, interested in sharing knowledge, interested in getting the facts straight—are so shocking to most old media people that it is literally impossible for them to report on Wikipedia without following a storyline that goes something like this: "Yeah, this was a crazy thing that worked for awhile [sic], but eventually they will see the light and realize that top-down control is the only thing that works."

Photo credit: Andrew Lih (Wikimedia Commons)

Wikia, the for-profit site that's home to massive user-created, wiki-based communities on everything from World of Warcraft to genealogy , is in fact finally making a profit, VentureBeat is reporting. Wikia, co-founded in 2004 by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, also says it's grown from 2.8 million to 6.5 million users in the first half of this year.

CEO Gil Penchina, an eBay veteran, told VentureBeat that a key revenue-driver is targeted ad-sponsorships. Ford, for example, markets the Taurus on the Recipes Wiki, but places "a more interactive, choose-your-car" ad on World of Warcraft.

At one point in our previous career, we worked on a project to create a run-of-the-mill online forum, where users of a particular product could post questions and get answers. One big muckety-muck at the company wondered whether we should create some sort of incentive system, like Amazon gift certificates, to encourage people to help provide answers.

"No need," we explained, "They're are plenty of people who love the opportunity to show what smarty pants they are."

Ryan Tate over at Valleywag is suggesting that's the key to Wikipedia's success as well.

A new study by the Wikimedia Foundation found that the vast majority of contributors—87 percent—are men.

According to the Wall Street Journal's Digits blog, the top reasons the 175,000 contributors said they participated were: "I knew there were specific topic areas that needed my help" (41%) and "It was clear to me that other people would benefit from my efforts" (36%).

Tate, however, thinks the reasons are more fundamental: The male drive for high status.

Why invest your free time wrangling with a politicized Wikipedia bureaucracy of infighting editors and bitter story subjects, all for the honor of creating a free resource for other people and paying out of your own pocket to go to high-level meetings for the Wikimedia elite? If you're a man, for the honor of being near the "top" of something, no matter how fruitless.

Photo credit: acaben

Well that was a bit of a PR snafu. Instead of launching news of their new proposed living-person-biography-editing processes themselves, Wikipedia watched as the New York Times and others reported on it first, sending the blogosphere (including us) roiling about how this marked a fundamental shift and otherwise untoward clamping down on what had previously been a delightful open-source system.

Today, however, Wikimedia deputy director Erik Moeller finally jumped into the fray and slapped a post on the Wikimedia Blog to clarify that the new policy, designed to balance the goal of quality "with the immediacy of Wikipedia as it exists today," is neither as draconian nor as misguided as it might have appeared, based on media reports.

Specifically:

Is this the beginning of the end for Wikipedia?

Everyone's favorite user-generated encyclopedia has announced it's inserting a layer of wetware (real-live humans for the non-tech-speakers out there) in between the users doing the generating and the final versions of articles about living people.

"We are no longer at the point that it is acceptable to throw things at the wall and see what sticks," Michael Snow, the chairman of the board of Wikimedia, Wikipedia's parent organization, was quoted as saying in the New York Times. "There was a time probably when the community was more forgiving of things that were inaccurate or fudged in some fashion—whether simply misunderstood or an author had some ax to grind. There is less tolerance for that sort of problem now."

Maybe. But the move is likely to have an unintended consequence. Wikipedia's brilliance is based on the fact that you know that each and every article is the result of a bunch of random people around the world battling it out to decide the definitive account of Michael Jackson's life history. (OK, he's no longer living, but you get the point.)

Adding a person in the middle to mediate is not only going to slow it down. It's going to break down users' trust in the final content. I mean, would you really believe that Experienced Volunteer X (Wikipedia says only experienced volunteers can become intermediaries) is the best person to determine what is and is not accurate and/or fudged about the delectable Mr. Pitt's biography, for example?

So, BayNewsarians, we invite you to start the countdown to when an alternative wiki-based encyclopedia emerges.

In the meantime, we suggest that Wikipedia forget the whole wetware thing and instead use a time-honored method of ensuring that contributors don't cross the line: Just make them identify themselves—and hold them legally liable for any libel.

It's long been known that psychiatry patients will do anything to cheat on the tests their doctors give them, which is why the most common responses to Rorschach inkblots have been a deeply guarded secret for nearly a century.

OK, totally not true. But some psychiatrists and psychologists are nevertheless in a bit of a kerfuffle over the fact that someone recently posted the most common answers to the test on Wikipedia.

"The more test materials are promulgated widely, the more possibility there is to game it," Bruce Smith, president of the International Society of the Rorschach and Projective Methods, said in a New York Times article today on the flap. The Times noted that Smith added "he did not mean that a coached subject could fool the person giving the test into making the wrong diagnosis, but rather 'render the results meaningless.'"

Much ado about nothing, says John M. Grohol, founder of the Psych Central Web site, in response to the Times article.

"People who want to find a way to 'game' psychological tests have always had ways to do so," Grohol writes on Psych Central today. "There have always been, for as long as I've been online, websites that discuss—in some depth and detail—various psychological instruments, how and what they measure, and ways to try to make a person 'look good' on them. Wikipedia simply makes it a bit simpler to do so."

Scientific American also jumped into the fray today, pointing to a 2005 article in the magazine saying the test is not particularly effective.

BayNewser, of course, has one and only response to the news that the answers to the Rorshach are on Wikipedia: Study break! Goodbye Cosmo Quiz. Hello Rorshach.

Image credit: Hermann Rorschach (Wikimedia Commons)