On 12/29/2010 2:31 AM, Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote:
> Let's imagine you wanted to start a rival to Wikipedia. Assume that you
> are motivated by money, and that venture capitalists promise you can be
> paid gazillions of dollars if you can do one, or many, of the following:
>
Ok, first of all you need a pot of gold at the end of the
rainbow. Let's assume it's a real business model and not that you know
a few folks who have $1B burning a hole in their pocket. Let's also
assume that it's a business model basic on getting a lot of traffic...
Secondly, if you want to go up against 'Wikipedia as a whole',
that's a very difficult problem. Wikipedia is one of the strongest
sites on the internet in terms of S.E.O., not because of any nasty
stuff, but because so many people link to Wikipedia articles from all
over the web. Wikipedia ranks highly for many terms and that's a
situation that Google & Bing don't mind, since Wikipedia has something
halfway decent to say about most topics... It makes search engines seem
smart.
To overturn Wikipedia on the conventional web, you'd really need
to beat it at S.E.O. Sneaky-peet tricks won't help you that much when
you're working at this scale, because if you're able to make enough
phony links to challenge one of the most-linked sites on Earth, you're
probably going to set off alarm bells up and down the West coast.
Thus, the challenge of a two-sided market faces anybody who wants to
'beat' Wikipedia, and I think it's just too hard a nut to crack, even
if you've got software that's way better and if you've got a monster
marketing budget.
I think there are three ways you can 'beat' Wikipedia in a smaller
sense. (i) in another medium, (ii) by targeting very specific
verticals, or (iii) by creating derivative products that add a very
specific kind of value (that is, targeting a horizontal)
In (i) I think of companies like Foursquare and Fotopedia that
follow a mobile-first strategy. If mobile apps got really big and
eclipsed the 'web as we know it', I can see a space for a Wikipedia
successor. This could entirely bypass the S.E.O. problem, but couldn't
Wikipedia fight back with a mobile app of it's own? On the other hand,
this might not be so plausible: the better mobile devices do an O.K.
job with 'HTML 5' and with improvements in hardware, networking and in
HTML-related specifications, so there might be no real advantage in
having 'an app for that'. Already people are complaining that a
collection of apps on your device creates a number of 'walled gardens'
that can't be searched in aggregate, and these kinds of pressures may
erode the progress of apps.
For (ii) I think of Wikia, which hosts things like
http://mario.wikia.com/wiki/MarioWiki
Stuff like this drives deletionists nuts on Wikipedia, but having
a place for them to live in Wikia makes everybody happy. Here's a place
where the Notability policy means that Wikipedia isn't competitive.
Now, in general, Wikia is trying to do this for thousands of subjects
(which might compete with Wikipedia overall) and they've had some
success, but not an overwhelming amount.
Speaking of notability, another direction is to make something
that's more comprehensive than Wikipedia. Consider Freebase, which
accepts Person records for any non-fictional person and has detailed
records of millions of TV episodes, music tracks, books, etc. If
Wikipedia refuses to go someplace, they create opportunities.
As for (iii) you're more likely to have a complementary
relationship with Wikipedia. You can take advantage of Wikipedia's
success and get some income to pay for people and machines. There
wouldn't be any possibility of 'replacing' Wikipedia except in a crazy
long-term scenario where, say, we can convert Wikipedia into a
knowledge base that can grow and update itself with limited human
intervention. (Personally I think this is 10-25 years off)
Anyhow, I could talk your ear off about (iii) but I'd make you
sign an N.D.A. first. ;-)
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
