<CPOV> The notion that Wikipedia will always be top dog

[Famiglietti, Andrew F]

Everyone, 

It is, of course, difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. It isn't impossible that a new project could garner serious attention and unseat the Wikipedia juggernaut. Certainly it is true that the Internet landscape has seen some radical changes in the past. I actually have a notion that we may have entered a relatively more stable period in which big players will remain big over relatively long spans of time. I can't prove that, though, just a hunch (mostly based on the seeming stability of Google over the last 10 years). 

All that said, I don't think things look good for Ilmpedia. They've decided to start their project in both English and Arabic, so they will be confronting the goliath of the English Wikipedia directly (an Arabic-only fork would only directly challenge the less established Arabic Wikipedia and, like the Spanish Fork before it, might gain some traction). A previous ideological fork of the English Wikipedia, Conservapedia, which had the benefits of a relatively privileged community of interest, the involvement of high-profile activist Andrew Schafly and the attendant free media attention that entailed remains a marginal (very low google visibility and traffic), but active project. As of right now, the Ilmpedia project's wiki page does indeed list about 100 registered users, but many of these users haven't even completed user pages, and a check of a few random contributor logs shows that many have no edits at all. Some pages show clear and unreverted link-spam, a bad sign for the health of a wiki. It is still very early, of course, and all that will probably change and improve as the project gets organized. The press release said they would be available in July, after all. 

I suspect Ilmpedia will, like Conservapedia before it, go on to become a successful but marginal project. I'm not dismissing these projects, the margins are important! However, I do think this suggests that the alleged "fragmentation" of the media space Sunstein et. al. fretted about is not, in fact, under way. Instead we see a pattern of very large, central sites of information production and distribution surrounded by marginal media, just as we did in the mass media era (Xerox produced Zines anyone?).

- Andy

PS: Dror, I have to ask, was your Wikipedia user id DrorK?
 
----- Original Message -----
From: "Juliana Brunello" <juliana at networkcultures.org>
To: "Gregory Kohs" <thekohser at gmail.com>
Cc: cpov at listcultures.org
Sent: Tuesday, June 15, 2010 5:14:13 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: Re: <CPOV> The notion that Wikipedia will always be top dog

> Are you certain, absolutely certain, that Wikipedia will rule the
> Internet encyclopedia biz in 10 years' time?

Important point. Specially in the case of Ilmpedia, where there is a huge
amount of people with the same belief and therefore a large amount of
possible contributors to the project. I don't think it will be a minor
encyclopedia fork like citizendium or the spanish fork. It actually has
great potential. Imagine all arab countries, which have a lot of their
culture in common and conflicting povs with the 'western' countries...
this could be just the beginning of a major separatist movement, not only
in the internet. Am I being too dramatic?

Juliana


> andrew.famiglietti at lcc.gatech.edu said:
>
> It is unlikely that these forks of Wikipedia will ever attract
> significant traffic. Larry Sanger's Citizendium, a fairly
> well-established parallel encyclopedia project, is ranked by Alexa as
> the 48,837th most visited website. Wikipedia is the 6th most visited
> website. Enciclopedia Libre Universal (EL), the product of the famous
> Spanish Fork of 2002, was outstripped in article production by the
> Spanish Wikipedia as of 2004. Wikipedia is in the top ten most visited
> websites in Mexico, Colombia, and Spain. EL does not appear in Alexa
> listings for the top 100 most visited Websites for these countries.
> Without traffic, a volunteer based project cannot attract volunteer
> labor, and thus cannot add and revise content. I wouldn't worry about
> fragmentation.
>
> +++++++
>
> Back when I was done with graduate school and beginning to land my
> first $50,000 marketing research projects, I remember when 90% of
> online search was dominated by three sites.  No, not Google and Yahoo
> and Bing.  Sites called AltaVista and WebCrawler and Lycos.
>
> Are you certain, absolutely certain, that Wikipedia will rule the
> Internet encyclopedia biz in 10 years' time?
>
> Greg
>
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>



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-- 
--
Andrew Famiglietti 
Brittain Fellow 
School of Literature, Communication, and Culture 
Georgia Institute of Technology

-- 
--
Andrew Famiglietti 
Brittain Fellow 
School of Literature, Communication, and Culture 
Georgia Institute of Technology