So what do you know?
Bridie Smith
January 15, 2011
Wikipedia turns 10 today, and while it has its critics, the online collaborative encyclopedia is one of the world's top websites, with no plans to go commercial.
BILLIONAIRE retailer Gerry Harvey has been in the news a bit lately. And as federal minister Mark Arbib knows from experience, if you're in the headlines, chances are you're also getting a Wikipedia workout. So while the Harvey Norman co-founder was acting as spokesman for a coalition of retailers trying to pressure the federal government to tax overseas online sales under $1000, someone, somewhere was editing Harvey's Wikipedia entry.
''Gerry Harvey has recently called any person buying online un-Australian,'' began the contributor this month. ''Yet he has failed to provide quality customer service and has not passed on the savings of the high Australian dollar. Basically becoming a billionare [sic] who would rather turn on his fellow countrymen than provide quality service!''
The only part of that paragraph to survive into this week was the un-Australian line. The rest of the rant was removed.
This, says John Lenarcic, RMIT's information technology lecturer and social media commentator, is the website's strength. An example of why the free, collaborative, online encyclopaedia - which turns 10 today - works.
In the decade since the site was launched by American co-founders Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia has remained true to its original altruistic goals: to create an open, global, non-commercial online encyclopaedia.
''That's one of the stellar achievements of the site,'' Lenarcic says. ''It's opened up knowledge to the world and allowed people to contribute to this vast body of knowledge.''
Wales, who still dabbles in a bit of editing, believes the site's global growth is limited only by literacy rates and internet access.
The wiki software was created six years before the website's launch, but Wales says applying it to an encyclopaedia was ''the real innovation''. That it worked was not a surprise, but he says the scale of today's ever-expanding site was. ''It's evolved pretty much the way I thought it would, but it's much bigger than I ever imagined.''
What began life as a single, English-language edition has ballooned to more than 250 languages, including Greenlandic, which is spoken by only 57,000 people. That edition recently passed the 1000 milestone for number of entries.
English is the dominant language but makes up less than 20 per cent of the total. There are more than a million articles each for French and German speakers and more than half a million each for several other languages, including Chinese and Japanese. But there is always room for more. A new language can be added by users creating a ''test wiki'' to prove there is enough demand.
The site has its critics, among them co-founder Larry Sanger, who left in 2002 and has since lamented the site's ''lack of respect'' for expertise, which, he says, exposes it to questions of credibility. However, the number of hits alone indicates the resource has become a regular point of reference.
According to web information company Alexa, Wikipedia is ranked the seventh most-used website in the world, with about 300 million page views each day. And despite the success - not to mention the potential dollars that could be milked from that - co-founder Jimmy Wales is adamant the site, which costs millions a year to run, will not accept advertising. Ever.
''We have no plans to do that,'' he says. ''It's just not who we are.''
Instead the site will continue to rely on yearly fund drives, which bring in millions of dollars, cobbled together from average donations of little more than $A40 a pop.
The potential worth of the website, which this year will open an Indian office, its first outside America, can only be guessed at. But to put things in context, the site sitting one spot above Wikipedia in the global popularity stakes is that of Chinese web services company Baidu, which includes Baidu Baike, an online collaboratively built encyclopedia. In 2009, revenue generated by the company was US$651 million.
But a commercial approach is not for Wales. He believes Wikipedia has become a core part of the globe's ''information infrastructure'' and he is not about to compromise that by going commercial. ''We prefer to have broad community support, which has worked for us in the past and we want to maintain that,'' he says.
The site, owned by non-profit organisation Wikimedia Foundation, has only 50 paid positions, most of them technology-based roles such as programmers and operations staff. The bulk of the manpower is supplied by a global community of volunteers. More than 91,000 active contributors work on more than 17 million articles in more than 270 languages.
But what of the accuracy and credibility of the site, which must surely inform its success? Lenarcic believes users should view Wikipedia as an encyclopaedia of popular culture - best consumed with a pinch of salt. This plays out in the stats, with Facebook, John Lennon, sex and YouTube the top queries driving traffic, according to Alexa. Searchers don't linger for long, spending about five minutes on a visit to the site and 59 seconds for a page view.
It's not what you'd call in-depth research, but the site doesn't pretend to be the authority. Like many other articles, the Gerry Harvey entry carries an eye-catching banner warning readers that it ''needs additional citations for verification''.
Last December, Labor powerbroker Mark Arbib's page was edited following WikiLeaks revelations that he was in regular contact with US diplomats. The news prompted descriptions of him as ''CIA agent, US mole, traitor, and US embassy hero'' to be added to his Wikipedia entry, at the expense of his portfolios. Arbib's page was altered 18 times over six hours before moderators reverted the page because of ''vandalism by multiple editors''.
The media interest passed and the page has not been modified since December 19.
''Wikipedia is self-correcting and if enough people see that article and flag an anomaly, somebody will change it,'' Lenarcic says. ''If something is open like Wikipedia then there is vigilance.''
However, its strength as an open site can also be its weakness.
''It's not subject to the same editorial process that other publications are bound by,'' Lenarcic says.
The most common gripe is a lack of academic vigilance, a claim that makes Adam Jenkins jump to Wikipedia's defence. A lecturer in information systems at the University of South Australia, Jenkins is also a regular editor of the site and vice-president of Wikimedia Australia, the Australian chapter of the organisation. ''There will always be problems there, but the reality is that there are a great number of experts on Wikipedia,'' he says.
Jenkins estimates that up to 90 per cent of editors who work on complex topics such as mass and formal logic would describe themselves as experts.
''The accuracy comes into play on those complex areas but when you come to ones like society and culture, then we're probably talking 50 per cent of editors who would describe themselves as experts,'' he says.
Jenkins, who is organising a ''meet-up'' at an Adelaide cafe today to mark Wikipedia's first decade, started editing three years ago because he found the concept interesting.
''It's not the topic that concerns me, it's the research. I'm an academic and you live for that stuff.''
He researches within his area of expertise but also edits content beyond that, such as the history of the Australian Capital Territory and cane toads. ''In Wikipedia, everyone's equal,'' he says. He is more than happy for others to edit and expand his work and agrees with Lenarcic that entries are best thought of as providing an overview of a subject. ''You can then follow the links and track down the sources and develop your own picture from there, which is what I recommend students do because it works really nicely.''
Has this search for a quick, easy, digestible overview changed or compromised the way we research? While fans praise the site for its global, collaborative structure and staunch determination to remain non-commercial, critics warn that it risks mixing facts with popular opinion. But whichever side of the online fence you favour, the site has undoubtedly changed the way information is shared, compared and reviewed.
That the website is so often a port of call for frustrated people reflects the position it occupies in contemporary society. Gerry Harvey is a case in point.
''If Wikipedia didn't exist, what could people do?'' Lenarcic asks. ''They could probably go and deface a Harvey Norman store. But these online sites have changed things. Graffiti now is largely purposeless; it's just tagging without any kind of commentary or opinion. That social commentary aspect of graffiti is being subsumed in the digital form through blogging or sites like Wikipedia.''
Bridie Smith is science and technology reporter.
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