For All Its Flaws, Wikipedia is the Way Information Works Now

Wikipedia, which turns 10 years old this weekend, has taken a lot of heat over the years. There has been repeated criticism of the site’s accuracy, of the so-called “cabal” of editors who decide which changes are accepted and which are not, and of founder Jimmy Wales and various aspects of his personal life and how he manages the non-profit service. But as a Pew Research report released today confirms, Wikipedia has become a crucial aspect of our online lives, and in many ways it has shown us — for better or worse — what all information online is in the process of becoming: social, distributed, interactive and (at times) chaotic.

 

According to Pew’s research, 53 percent of American Internet users said they regularly look for information on Wikipedia, up from 36 percent of the same group the first time the research center asked the question in February of 2007. Usage by those under the age of 30 is even higher — more than 60 percent of that age group uses the site regularly, compared with just 33 percent of users 65 and older. Based on Pew’s other research, using Wikipedia is more popular than sending instant messages (which less than half of Internet users do), and is only a little less popular than using social networking services, which 61 percent of users do regularly.

The term “wiki” — just like the word “blog,” or the name “Google” for that matter — is one of those words that sounds so ridiculous it was hard to imagine anyone using it with a straight face when Wikipedia first emerged in the early 2000s. But despite a weird name and a confusing interface (which the site has been trying to improve to make it easier to edit things), Wikipedia took off and has become a powerhouse of “crowdsourcing,” before most people had even heard that word. In fact, the idea of a wiki has become so powerful that document-leaking organization WikiLeaks adopted the term even though (as many critics like to point out) it doesn’t really function as a wiki at all.

Most people will never edit a Wikipedia page — like most social media or interactive services, it follows the 90-9-1 rule, which states that 90 percent of users will simply consume the content, 9 percent or so will contribute regularly, and only about 1 percent will ever become dedicated contributors. But even with those kinds of numbers, the site has still seen more than 4 billion individual edits in its lifetime, and has more than 127,000 active users. Those include people like Simon Pulsifer, once known as “the king of Wikipedia” because he edited over 100,000 articles. Why? Because that was his idea of fun, as he explained to me at a web conference.

Yes, there will always be people who decide to edit the Natalie Portman page so that it says she is going to marry them, or create fictional pages about people they dislike. But the surprising thing isn’t that this happens — it’s how rarely it happens, and how quickly those errors are found and corrected.

With Twitter, we are starting to see how a Wikipedia-like approach to information scales even further. As events like the Giffords shooting take hold of the national consciousness, Twitter becomes a real-time news service that anyone can contribute to, and it gradually builds a picture of what has happened and what it means. Along the way, there are errors and all kinds of other noise — but over time, it produces a very real and human view of the news. Is it going to replace newspapers and television and other media? No, just as Wikipedia hasn’t replaced encyclopedias (although it has made them less relevant).

That is the way information works now, and for all their flaws, Wikipedia and Jimmy Wales were among the first to recognize that.

-via gigaom.com

Twitter, Google, Facebook's 2010 Memes Reveal Each Site's Strengths | Fast Company

BY Kit Eat

 

trends

Twitter, Google and Facebook are busily revealing their top ten trends for 2010. As well as being curios in themselves, the lists reveal, in stark words, exactly what users think the purpose of each of these services is.

Twitter's list is its "Top Trends," a product of its algorithm that detects what most people are talking about on its network. Its emphasis is on hot topics that quickly rise in popularity--a good measure of how interesting something is, and an excellent way to keep Justin Bieber off the top of the list. 

Facebook's "Memeology: Top Status Trends of the Year" is a more analytical affair than Twitter's. It boils down the year's billions of Facebook status trends down to a top ten list. The terms here grew fastest compared to words from 2009.

Google's Zeigeist highlights the most popular search phrases throughout 2010, in a multitude of different ways. The list we selected is the fastest-rising search trends. While the search trends don't match up exactly with the same sort of usage as people tweeting or updating their statuses on Facebook, it gives a good flavor of what the world is looking for online--and presumably then tweeting about.

The top ten lists are shown together above. Firstly they reveal that the world seems obsessed by a 16 year-old Canadian pop singer (though there's no trend for "bad haircut" that parallels Justin Bieber's presence on all three lists).

They also reveal that there's just one gadget that defines 2010 for most Netizens--Apple's iPad. This bodes well for Apple, which is likely to reveal its updated version in a few weeks.

Mentions of Google's Android smartphones, which are rapidly encroaching on the iPhone's territory, were prominent on Twitter--but not Google. 

Facebook was a place where new acronyms emerged: Hit Me Up (HMU) was its most popular trend, "digital shorthand for people to ask their friends to hang out."

Missing from all lists was "WikiLeaks," which is surprising, given the fact it has dominated the news for months.

But there are three big take-aways here: Twitter is used to talk about newsy items (highlighted in red), Google is most often used for entertainment-related info (blue highlights), and Facebook was a mix of both with some oddities thrown in. This is user-determined data, rather than the purposes that the sites themselves would like you to think of when you imagine their brand. 

 

via fastcompany.com