Invitations and Becomings

Thanks to Stewart Mader for putting us onto Rogers Cadenhead's post about Wikipedia beating both blogs and the NY Times in a Google search for the top stories of 2007.

A couple of cents worth I'd like to add. In my opinion, the result isn't nearly as interesting as it's being made out to be, because we're comparing numbers of apples and pears here. An encyclopedia is not a news source. A better comparison would have been with wikinews, rather than wikipedia.

That said, the differences between wikis and published media like blogs and the nytimes are very interesting.

1. The longer you wait, the better wikipedia will perform in this kind of test.
   Why? Because wikipedia absorbs information from other sources as time goes on, in ways that published media (incl. blogs) can't replicate. Or, to put the point more radically...
2. Open wikis like wikipedia simply do not understand the concept of competition.
   If there's a competition gene, wikis don't have it. Wikis only recognize other collaborators, not competitors.

This is why Wikipedia will only improve it's relative accuracy compared to Brittanica. Any way in which Brittanica improves it's articles is almost certain to improve Wikipedia's.

It's also why Wikipedia looks like it's cheating when evaluated in competitive terms. But it's not cheating, Wikis simply aren't playing the same sort of game. (This has huge ramifications in education, where this kind of collaboration compromises traditional academic values and starts to resembles plagiarism. More of that another time...)