The future trends for the foundation, according to its founder are twofold:
on the one hand, it’s about expanding Wikipedia’s language capability and namely the most popular languages of India (in India there are over 20 different languages!”). In order to do that, keyboard issues will have to be overcome; “this will be a challenge!” Jimmy Wales added,
on the other hand, the future is also about a new project name Wikia. “If Wikipedia was the beginning, i.e. an encyclopaedia, wiki is much more ambitious platform; it is meant to be a library!” declared Jimmy ‘Jimbo’ Wales.
Jimmy Wales gave us a few example of new projects developed from the platform, in order to give us a flavour of what the future holds:
The Guttenplag wiki (http://de.guttenplag.wikia.com) for instance, is a full-fledged critical report of the Ph.D. dissertation of Karl Theodor Freiherr (Earl) zu Guttenberg in which the authors of the collaborative project demonstrated that 371 pages of that dissertation (i.e. over 60% of the whole document) were actually copied from other sources. This led to the resignation of this gentleman as defence minister of the Federal Republic of Germany (for details refer to “Karl Theodor zu Gutenberg: “baron without a title” BBC.co.uk 18th of February 2011). Hundreds of people, not just journalists, took part in this project, Jimmy pointed out. In essence, one could comment that what this Wikia platform is bringing the power of wikis to the people.
… is the mother company behind the online encyclopaedia. Its primary source of funding is its yearly donation campaigns. “Last year’s campaign was most successful“, Jimmy Wells emphasised. $19 million were donated online, out of the $28 million which make up the annual budget of the non-profit. Running servers and paying for the bandwidth supporting those millions of pages costs a mint of money, and $28 million is a handsome budget. The aim of the foundation is to be “independent, neutral and avoid the whitewashing of anything for anybody” Jimmy added.
Yet, how you ensure neutrality and fairness in the community in which not everyone is capable of editing the content(see part 4 in this series) is a much debatable issue.
Having said that, the foundation has 80 full-time employees working for it, and above 100,000 volunteers. “Do not expect our employee pays to grow to the 4,000 level within 10 years” Jimmy Wales said, this is not supposed to happen!
The new generation doesn’t know what a regular encyclopaedia is Jimmy Wales went on: he gave us evidence of that when he shared a tweet with us in which a teacher (see above picture) was asking a student what and encyclopaedia was and the student responded: “is it some sort of Wikipedia?“. One may well surmise that Wikipedia has become the epitome of an encyclopaedia … for better or for worse.
Yet, don’t imagine that your average Wikipedia contributor is representative of the overall population: “87% of our contributors are made male ” Jimmy pointed out. ”This is because the software is very geeky” he added.
The technical complexity of the code is “putting off other people who aren’t computer nerds” he added. But the Wikipedia team is working on a new improved WYSIWYG interface (thank God! I’m not exactly computer illiterate but editing Wikipedia for me is a real chore).
For the same reasons, contributors tend to be very young, the average age being 26. And the number of Ph.D. among them is double the average numbers of what they are among the overall population!
Talking about usage, not all the world is using the popular online Cyclopaedia in the same way. Jimmy provided a very striking comparison (see above picture). The Japanese for instance, are very focused on pop culture which is according to Jimmy Wells, “a very important part of Japanese life”. I personally couldn’t imagine it could be any worse than in Britain and France but it is apparently…
Our German neighbours seem to be very much into geography Jimmy went on “a joke which could only be made in Holland” according to him, hinting at the darkest hours of Europe. The Spanish and French are the only nationalities in which they are not articles about sex he added; maybe a sign that “they are the only ones who are actually having it” he ventured, and they are far more interested in culture and the arts than the average too.
a world of differences
“it is difficult to draw any conclusions from this” he commented more seriously, but it defeats the idea that we have all become similar. On the contrary, it ‘”shows the great cultural differences between nationalities”. It is easy to explain and he gave us an example: “any Briton would be interested in reading facts about Nick Clegg” he said. Other nationalities wouldn’t even know what party he is from and why he is deputy Prime Minister.
[photo by YAG: Chinese restaurants using the Wikipedia brand to name weird dishes ]
20 million articles in 270 different languages
with 420 million visits per month, Wikipedia is a behemoth even though “English growth is slowing down” according to its co-founder. Yet, other languages are soaring, namely those of emerging countries. Kazakhstan for instance is a fast-growing contender, but nothing like Chinese (Wikipedia has now been allowed there even though pages like that on Tienanmen Square are still filtered according to ‘Jimbo’).
Censorship issues and usage in China
“Wikipedia doesn’t want any involvement with censorship” Jimmy Wales declared. Even though he has contacts with Chinese officials, he said he didn’t want to hear the complaints about the content being supposedly inadequate. “I’m still waiting to hear the complaints” he added. Yet, whether this is due to censorship or not, and despite the growth he described early on, and regardless of the Chinese habit to recycle the Wikipedia brand name in weird and hypothetical dishes (see photo above), “usage is still lagging behind” in the Middle Kingdom.
On October 26, I attended the IStrategy conference which took place in Amsterdam. I was there to deliver a keynote on social media are ROI/ROE, but I must confess I also attended the conference in order to listen to Jimmy Wales who gave us an overview of his celebrated online encyclopaedia: Wikipedia. I was there in the front row, with my notebook in my lap. Here is the account of Jimmy Wales’s most impressive presentation, a good means of taking a bit of hindsight and LAN learning to know better a collaborative website which everyone uses but few have in-depth knowledge about.
[photo by YAG: Jimmy Wales on stage at iStrategy in Amsterdam on October 26]
who is using Wikipedia?
Was Jimmy Wales introductory question to the audience and not surprisingly, everyone raised their hands. “who has edited Wikipedia?” Was question number two and a couple of dozen delegates raised their hands this time, which shows that the audience was really upmarket. It also demonstrates a known fact, i.e. that only a fraction of users are content producers, and that most of them are content with the ability to look at others users’ entries.
no free beer
Wikipedia is “based on the concept of free software” Jimmy Wales went on. But free, in that instance, doesn’t mean that it’s free in “the free beer sense of the term” he added. What it really means, he explained, is that “everything that goes into Wikipedia can be reused and redistributed, repurposed for all kinds of things, namely the translation into a number of languages”.
what Wikipedia is … and isn’t about
Wikipedia is meant to be “the sum of all human knowledge”. A somewhat bombastic boast I would say, for there are instances in which, the online encyclopaedia is delivering false information; this should not be forgotten, even though – like me – one really dotes on the project, the crosschecking of information is a necessary and unavoidable process.
Regardless, what Jimmy Wales was hinting at was that the purpose of the online collaborative project is to collect information on Hamlet for instance, not to be a repository of everything regarding Hamlet, let alone to “keep a copy of Hamlet” he said. It’s about describing and debating Hamlet… and other subjects.
At the end of his introduction, Jimmy announced that the Wikimedia foundation (i.e. the non-profit organisation he is heading) has launched a new project which caters for those wanting to debate Hamlet, and other subject, on and on and on. This new project is called Wikia. But before we delve into this new venture, I remember that Jimmy Wales gave us an overview of Wikipedia and how it’s being used worldwide; this will be the subject of a few other posts on this blog… Stay tuned!
As I explained in a previous post on his blog, my gifts for the New Year is now available for download at www.visionarymarketing.com. Here is the introductory text again for those who have missed the previous entry.
“If you have always wanted to know everything about innovation but were too afraid to ask, rest assured because Visionary Marketing will bring this information to you in a few days.
Our good friend Brice Auckenthaler (founder and general manager of Experts-Consulting, a leading edge Innovation Consultancy group based in Paris, France) has been kind enough to let us publish the first few sheets from his brand new book to come: Imagination 3.0. Although the official release of Imagination 3.0 will take place in late January, you will be able to read and download the first few pages of this new unmissable opus in a few days from now.
Brice is undoubtedly our best expert in innovation and his and his team’s ability cover the entire spectrum of innovation, from creativity to making the rubber meet the road. Their references encompass major players as Nestlé and Thalys, Maserati, Mc Donald’s, Ferrari, Kraft, Coca Cola, Société Générale and others. Their footprint is International (Europe, USA, Asia, South America, China, Australia etc.) and their teams multi-cultural. Their capabilities extend from benchmarking, interviews and research, scenario planning [brand architecture and brand stretching], to brand & innovation committees on the new brand assets, new initiatives for product launches.”
A short while ago I went to visit one of my customers in order to have a discussion about innovation. One of the ideas that was mentioned during this meeting was about the need to have a repository in which ideas could be stored and in which one could also exchange and debate about them. Immediately, the idea of a wiki sprang to my mind. It’s only natural because this is what I’m using in the office; at Orange business services we have a Confluence(*) wiki platform, set up on top of an Oracle files database (a popular CMS platform used for building repositories) and the wiki enables us to store as many documents as we wish and start discussions with our colleagues and actually to organise ourselves around projects. This is very convenient and I thought it was worth mentioning in a discussion with my client.
And indeed the client in question was interested. However, this client also mentioned to me the name of a project by IBM that I have never heard of before: Thinkplace. At first I thought it was some sort of piece of software that you would put on the Intranet and then use to share material with your colleagues. But then I realised, by searching the Web with the ‘thinkplace’ keyword, that thinkplace was actually a fully fledged open Internet website whereby anybody, repeat anybody, can post ideas in order to be debated with others. I don’t know if that’s web 2.0 for you, but I think that’s a great idea. So I entered my idea. The only way to test the system, is to do it hands-on, and actually if it is about proposing new ideas and getting people to start discussions, I thought it would be a great opportunity to submit an idea I had thought of and get the opinion of others. So here’s my idea, in writing and in a short video which I recorded for the purpose and posted on Facebook too.
The idea is to enable collective and fully connected shared open spaces, between different companies, on the outskirts of the cities of our big metropolises to avoid unnecessary commuting, + provide outstanding infrastructure & tools for knowledge workers
Reduce the impact of commuting on the environment, improve work efficiency, develop open innovation, improve well-being of employees
How would it work? How might it be implemented?
Several high-tech companies could partner together to provide such shared spaces, in partnership with professional real-estate companies. Shared spaces could then be rented out to companies (large or medium) who would rent a number of cubicles for their employees: salespeople, knowledge workers, clerks etc
What are the benefits to the stakeholders of this idea?
The idea is to enable collective and fully connected shared open spaces, between different companies. On the outskirts of the cities of our big metropolises so as to avoid unnecessary commuting, as well as provide a work dedicated area for knowledge workers, and also entice knowledge sharing across different organisations. The project is not technologycal per se, but technology is of the essence when it comes to making people collaborate. These shared office spaces could also be the opportunity for high technology companies (IT infrastructure, application software, telecommunications etc) to demonstrate new technologies in the collaboration area, and even develop new tools, more pervasive, more user-friendly. The impact on the environment as well as the well-being of employees would be dramatic.
Despite the availability of cheap and almost unlimited bandwidth, pervasive and outstanding collaboration tools, which enable people to share documents and even design new ones over the Internet without leaving their offices, I have noticed that working habits by and large haven’t changed much in the past 15 years. Despite all the talk about remote working, mobility, pervasive computing etc, most of the knowledge workers from our big cities around the globe are still doing the same stupid thing everyday: spend hours commuting from their leafy suburbs to the centre of town, or even the other way round. However, should we ask these people sitting at their desk why they have to be in the office, I think we would be very surprised to discover that, for a vast majority of them, the people they work with most of the time are not sitting next to them in the cubicle next door, but faraway. And even when they are located in a nearby building, chances are they will talk to eachother over the phone.
The benefit would be manyfold. High-tech companies would not only make revenue on this, but that would also provide them some sort of showcase for their new technologies, and they would also be able to benefit from this initiative to show that their ideas can have a positive impact on the environment. This would be a compelling living proof that technology can actually do something about the environment. Participating companies would also benefit from this idea because they will have to invest less in real estate, they would have more flexible workforces, and it has also been proven by IBM in a similar experiment in Paris, France (1995 and beyond) that on average employees were gaining 1 1/2 hours every day on travel time and that one of our out of this one hour and a half was reinvested in work and productivity (employees been keen to show that they don’t benefit from the system but are more productive.
(*) Confluence is one of the platforms made available to enterprises in order to set up internal wikis
a must-read article, courtesy of Time Magazine and besides, it’s available online for free.
The founder of Wikipedia is answering honest questions about vandalism, quality of content, trust and the virtual organisation and why Wikimedia is about to compete with Google on a new opensource search-engine.
Howard Rheingold’s vision of ‘the guy in the basement‘ who is the one responsible for innovation is becoming reality. I have attached a great article in which Rheingold depicts the importance of collaboration and how people can actually re-shape the corporate world in which we live, and for some of us, barely survive. (download the source of innovation – Howard Rheingold).
Now in a businessweek article are living examples of how people are actually changing the world from the bottom-up. Only 2 years ago, when Jérôme Delacroix from Cooperatics first talked to me about wikis I had been very intrigued. Then I tried to set up a wikiweb by myself but did not really manage to get people interested or at least not as much as I had managed with my legacy website and now with all my blogs. Now I can realise how much the world has changed in a very short period of time. The phenomenon has even been granted a name by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams: Wikinomics, i.e. economics revisited by collaboration. Today I have a wiki back in the office, which I populate and which I use everyday to foster innovation internally and get people to cooperate for business, and I also use this blog to populate the wiki and the forums and the rest of it (innovating from the outside in). What Charles Handy was writing about the virtual organisation 12 years ago was really visionary; not that I ever doubted it of course, but it’s reached scales never attained before.
This is a question I had for a long time. One felt that participation was becoming mainstream but I had my doubts about the sheer mass of users who were major contributors to a project like the much publicised Wikipedia. It turns out that Jérôme Delacroix was able to answer that question by pointing me towards the wikipedia statistics available online (click here). Taken on face value, the numbers are rather awesome: more than 4300 users have contributed more than 5 articles (since 2001 I assume). When compared to the overall number of Internet users, it may seem very small but I’d rather cast a positive look on them and emphasise the significance of the user mass. The ramp-up of the collaboration on Wikipedia is also very impressive (check the charts by clicking the relevant button).
The Guttenplag wiki (http://de.guttenplag.wikia.com) for instance, is a full-fledged critical report of the Ph.D. dissertation of Karl Theodor Freiherr (Earl) zu Guttenberg in which the authors of the collaborative project demonstrated that 371 pages of that dissertation (i.e. over 60% of the whole document) were actually copied from other sources. This led to the resignation of this gentleman as defence minister of the Federal Republic of Germany (for details refer to “Karl Theodor zu Gutenberg: “baron without a title” BBC.co.uk 18th of February 2011). Hundreds of people, not just journalists, took part in this project, Jimmy pointed out. In essence, one could comment that what this Wikia platform is bringing the power of wikis to the people.
Howard Rheingold’s vision of ‘the guy in the basement‘ who is the one responsible for innovation is becoming reality. I have attached a great article in which Rheingold depicts the importance of collaboration and how people can actually re-shape the corporate world in which we live, and for some of us, barely survive. 
This is a question I had for a long time. One felt that participation was becoming mainstream but I had my doubts about the sheer mass of users who were major contributors to a project like the much publicised 
