Michael Myers

ITEC-4700: Class 5 – Wikipedia

In #teaching
01/20/2010
2 Min read
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Last night we reviewed Wikipedia as a business (cleverly using Wikipedia) and we looked that the other businesses that Wikipedia has created.

From this list of projects, Wikipedia sure looks like acquisition fodder for Google. Not sure how they’d made money and sometimes not sure they care.

We also attempted to edit, create Wikipedia entries without much success. The theme that kept coming up was it has to be notable and factual. Factual is relatively easy. Notable in my mind gets a little more sticky. When we talk about niche celebrity, how many people know how Chris Anderson is outside of technology. I’m curious to see how the concept of notable changes with the deep dive the online world will take into local and micro-niche.

The goal reviewing Wikipdeia (the largest crowdsourcing project to-date) was to two fold.

  1. How hard is it to get something submitted to enable businesses to be discovered? Wikipedia entries come back on the first page of search results most of the time. For businesses this is more real estate on the search results page and therefore more opportunity to be found. (Another aspect of the corporate social graph and its impact on search.) Also, submitting materials across other Wikipedia properties may pay off as search results become more usable.
  2. How can I educate my potential customers about my business? This is a purely (non-salesy) way of educating users which is much more important in a transparent economy.

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By Michael Myers 01/20/2010
293 comments
Michael Myers