Presented to Prof. Dr. Eduard Heindl & BCM Why Wikipedia is so successful?

Agenda Introduction Factors that made Wikipedia successful Few drawbacks of Wikipedia Comparison with other encyclopedias Conclusion

Wikipedia Run by Non-Profit organization “Wikimedia Foundation” Started in 15 th January 2001 Multi Lingual Encyclopedia – currently exists in 262 languages* Launched by Jimmy Wales & Larry Sanger *as of 01 st Sep 2010

“Wiki” & “-Pedia” One among the ten most visited website* Logos used: Till late 2001   From late 2001 until 2003    From 2003 till present day (Jan 2011)  *study from Alexa and Comscore as of Jan 2011 Wikipedia

Over 17 million articles (as of Jan 2011) English, German & French Wikipedia – each more than 1 million articles Traffic accumulated* 54% - English Wikipedia 10% - Japanese Wikipedia 8% - German Wikipedia 5% - Spanish Wikipedia Growth of English Wikipedia in terms of no of articles *Survey done by Alexa Inc (as of May 2010)

Wikipedia Until 2004, Wikipedia used single server Currently, majority of their servers are located in Florida (300 servers)* Small portion in Amsterdam (44 servers)* Between 25,000 – 60,000 clicks per second** Databases runs in MySQL query * as of Dec 2009 **as of Oct 2008

Factors that led to be successful User factors Openness Computer skills Motivation Neutrality Knowledge factors Type of knowledge Fast changing rate Peer review Technology factors Easy usability Fast access Infinite reach & multilingual

Many people visiting the website Wikipedia attracts all sorts of people Large articles database Timeliness & Readability Comprehensiveness & Depth Editing Wikipedia Vandalism Factors that led to be successful

Organization Advantages over traditional encyclopedia Additional factors Steady growth of traffic Greater the people visits, greater the article (count as well as content) Exponential growth of articles Run by non-profit foundation – free of cost No advertisement, no commercial view Factors that led to be successful

Editing in Wikipedia

Few drawbacks Reliability Pictures Some unnoticed Vandalism Quality of writing Biases created by users Dialects

Comparison of Wikipedia over other encyclopedias WikipediaBritannicaEncarta Organization Wikimedia Foundation Britannica.com Inc (online version) Microsoft No of Articles 3,500,000 (English)120,000 (Online)62,000 (English) First Edition 2001 First publication 1768 – 1771 (online – 1994, CD- ROM from 1989) 1993 Languages (English, French, Japanese, Korean, Spanish and simplified Chinese) 8 (English, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese and Japanese) Revision Continuously revised (by users) Updated regularly Closed on 31 st Oct, 2009 (Japan’s Encarta – 31 st Dec, 2009) Cost Free49.95 pounds (approx. 60 Euros)* ________ *as of 19 th Jan, 2011

Conclusion Jimmy Wales – "an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language“ In spite of increase of Wikipedia’s reputation in recent years, still cannot be used as primary resource for research purpose First preference to the people for learning something new Timeliness of gaining knowledge Wikipedia, as a collaborative initiative using a social medium, has been very successful

Thank you

References Forte, A., Bruckman, A. Why do People Write for Wikipedia? Incentives to Contribute to Open-Content Publishing. GROUP 05 workshop position paper. Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, by Author “John Broughton”, O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2008 Kittur, A., Chi, E. H., and Suh, B What’s in Wikipedia? Mapping Topics and Conflict Using Socially Annotated Category Structure In Proceedings of the 27th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, MA, USA, April 04 – 09, 2009). CHI '09. ACM, New York, NY, 1509– "Five-year Traffic Statistics for Wikipedia.org". Alexa Internet. "Google Traffic To Wikipedia up 166% Year over Year". Hit wise on prescott/2007/02/wikipedia_traffic_sources.html. prescott/2007/02/wikipedia_traffic_sources.html "Internet encyclopedias go head to head". The study was cited in several news articles, e.g., "Wikipedia survives research test". BBC News (BBC). December 15, Wikipedia.org Site Info. Alexa