Wikipedia’s Success Doesn’t Validate Wikis
Posted on January 16, 2007
It seems like everyone is using Wikipedia. Almost no one will disagree that Wikipedia has achieved astounding success over the past year. With high Google PageRank, Wikipedia results are likely to be at the top of many search results. This, and the fact that Wikipedia has become near-de facto standard for people doing ad-hoc research ensures that this cycle of success will continue.
Wikipedia’s incredible success however doesn’t validate the Wiki as a collaborative platform. Rather, it’s the combination of right-place, right-time, critical mass, network effect, viral marketing Web 2.0ishness that made Wikipedia shine. Wikipedia is similar to many other Internet success stories in that their formula for greatness is anything but easy to decompose. However in the case of Wikipedia, a critical item NOT in that formula is the use of a Wiki as the underlying collaborative engine.
This is evidenced by several factors:
- There are no other Wiki mega-success stories on the Internet
- Problems associated with democratizing content creation, as has been the case in several high-profile Wikipedia-related cases have raised a degree of skepticism towards the Wiki as an authoritative body of knowledge
- The Wiki paradigm, a collaborative process which allows users to directly contribute to other people’s work, isn’t radical enough to cause a paradigm shift. The underlying technology, which lets users modify each other’s content in-place has existed for a long time under different window dressings.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t good Wiki use cases (i.e. corporate internal/team collaboration) or that future hits like Wikipedia won’t happen, but the Wiki as a medium isn’t the secret sauce that will make the collaborative environment a success.
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