Open Information Conference Submission
Social Media - learning from the Wikipedia example
What is Wikipedia?
Wikipedia is a free online encyclopaedia. It and the other smaller Wikimedia projects form the 4th most popular property on the Internet, used by about a third of all internet users every month. Wikipedia's peak website traffic reaches up to 45,000 page views per second and it has 13 million articles in over 250 languages with hundreds of thousands of contributors active every month. The most important questions to be asked are why it works and how can other corporate organisations adapt their business models to earn and learn from Wikipedia’s success.
So why does Wikipedia work?
As a project it is driven by social media principles that call for the involvement of the many hundreds and thousands of unpaid experts and volunteers. Wikipedia runs on consensus and decisions are agreed by the many rather than dictated by the few. The key to Wikipedia’s success is full involvement of users in the creation of new articles and the improvement of existing ones. By engaging with everyone we let the genuine wisdom of the crowd shine though.
Consensus is based around listening and respect. Everyone’s opinion is important and is respected, even when there are difficult decisions to be made with regard to interpretation on copy, tone of article or on grammatical style to apply.
When the project started, everyone said it would never work because anyone could edit it so anyone could damage it. They were right, but it turns out that so many more people want to improve it so that the net result is an ever better encyclopaedia. Wikipedia, like other social media projects, could never work in theory, only in practice.
A phenomenon of the social media world which is seen on Wikipedia is that, when trusted and valued, the community of users will police themselves and that, even though Wikipedia is driven at a volunteer level, the community seeks out mistakes in or vandalism to articles and takes pride in swiftly fixing them.
How can businesses learn from social media projects like Wikipedia?
One of the main reasons for the success of social media projects like Wikipedia is that the people working on them are a community of individuals. Emphasis is put on working together, but not at the expense of individuality. Everyone is welcome to work on what interests them and that they think is important. That would appear to involve a serious risk of important, but boring, tasks not being completed, however that isn't seen to happen on Wikipedia. When people value the project, they voluntarily do even the most boring tasks. Businesses can learn from this by giving their employees more freedom to work as they want. An example of this can be seen by Google's "20% time".