Wikipedia corrects Encyclopedia Britannica

This is an email I sent out to a group at work after a discussion on some new ventures. I thought I would share the email.

Hey guys, I’m going to try and start sending information like this to give you an idea of why things that are free - don’t mean they are of lesser quality over products that a company may offer.

I’m bring this up per our discussion of open source vs. paid model. “Wouldn’t a company that is paying for high end researchers have a better product than a community of people could offer?”.

Example:

Wikipedia is a FREE encyclopedia that anyone can edit online.

One could easily argue that if anyone could edit this information, it is more than likely going to be corrupt and not valid. Something like “Encyclopedia Britannica” would be much more valid than a product like this.

However - this is not true.

Words from Jimmy Wales

(source) 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.

“(Jimmy Wales) 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.

“(Jimmy Wales)…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.”

Case in point

posted on October 8, 2005 | 8:48 AM EST

Rich Ard Says:

That’s a pretty large leap to make - that Wiki’s head argues that they are more accurate than a commercial product, so they must be; this does not take into account the amount of information on the Wikipedia which has been gleaned from commercial sources, nor any inaccurate information El Wik holds of which Mr. Wales is not aware.

Posted at: October 8, 2005 11:22 PM

Ryan Merket Says:

I love Wikipedia, I use it daily. My Video Production professor challenged us to find out what a ‘C47’ was in the video world. The following class I was the only one who got it right… Wikipedia! All of the other students said they search Google for hours and found nothing.

Anyway, I hope all is well!

Posted at: October 12, 2005 1:27 AM

theParagon