Wikipedia Collaborative Content Community (situation analysis)
Wikipedia is a Web-based, multi-language, free-content encyclopedia written collaboratively by volunteers and sponsored by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its purpose is to create and distribute a free international encyclopedia in as many languages as possible. Wikipedia is one of the most popular reference sites on the web, receiving around 60 million hits per day.
Wikipedia contains approximately 1.6 million articles. More than 650,000 of these are in English, more than 250,000 in German, and more than 100,000 each in Japanese and French. It is edited by volunteers in wiki fashion, meaning articles are subject to change by nearly anyone.
Because of its open nature, vandalism and inaccuracy are problems in Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a community of users who are proportionally few, but highly active.
Wikipedia is supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. All of their sites are free from advertisements. Visitors are not charged to edit, read or use any contents. Annual budget is around USD 750K. They rely entirely on fundraising drives to fund their projects. The use of advertisements (Google style) as a revenue source has been rejected up to know by the Board of the Wikimedia foundation, it is seen as being against the "open content" policy.
Products
Wikipedia offers the following products:
- The Wikipedia itself. This generates no revenue, but is widely used.
- Community: Wikipedia facilitates the content creator stakeholders by providing various facilities (IRC, talk-pages, honour system for active editors), as well as annual meetings in Europe and the US.
- Accessories: Wiki-related books published by third parties, T-Shirts, coffee mugs, etc. This generates a low amount of revenue, but enhances the community spirit.
Stakeholder Analysis
There are three main stakeholder groups:
- Content Contributors: those actively partcipating in the process of writing or editing content of the Wikipedia. Note that the threshold for these activities is low.
- Users: those using the contents of the Wikipedia.
- Tools providers: those responsible for creating the Wiki tools or maintaining the software/hardware used by the Wikipedia.
These stakeholder groups are further segmented by language. Participation of a stakeholder in a partcular language edition of the Wikipedia assumes a certain level of knowledge of the language in question. Given that large parts of the user comunity understand some degree of English, this tends to increase the use of Wikipedia's in widely spoken languages.
Figure 1 shows the distribution of the "Very Active Contributors" (a classification made by Wikipedia itself, consisting of 3000 contributors) by language. Figure 2 shows the number of page visits to specific language versions of Wikipedia. The source for both diagrams is the data as shown on the statistics page of Wikipedia.
The distriution of content providers and users is more or less the same, with the notable exception of Japanese, Spanish and Polish.
Business Model
Given that the content of Wikipedia is produced under an open license, there are providers of websites which "wrap" the Wikipedia content in a new page jointly with (Google) adverts.
Two authors have written books about Wiki's an Wikipedia.
The business model for Wiki's in general has yet to be established. Socialtext (hosts/provider of Wikis) offers a fee-per-user based business model which is based on the hosting of Wiki's as a collaboratiove environment.
