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Why Wikipedia is so successful?

Why Wikipedia is so successful?. Presented to Prof. Dr. Eduard Heindl & BCM 2010-11. Agenda. Introduction Factors that made Wikipedia successful Few drawbacks of Wikipedia Comparison with other encyclopedias Conclusion. Wikipedia.

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Why Wikipedia is so successful?

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  1. Why Wikipedia is so successful? Presented to Prof. Dr. Eduard Heindl & BCM 2010-11

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

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

  4. Wikipedia • “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

  5. 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 *Survey done by Alexa Inc (as of May 2010) Growth of English Wikipedia in terms of no of articles

  6. 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

  7. 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

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

  9. 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

  10. Editing in Wikipedia

  11. Editing in Wikipedia

  12. Editing in Wikipedia

  13. Editing in Wikipedia

  14. Editing in Wikipedia

  15. Editing in Wikipedia

  16. Editing in Wikipedia

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

  18. Comparison of Wikipedia over other encyclopedias *as of 19th Jan, 2011

  19. 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

  20. Thank you

  21. References • http://wikieducator.org/Wikieducator_tutorial/What_is_a_wiki/Advantages_and_disadvantages • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_succeeding • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_Wikipedia_is_so_great • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/About_Wikipedia • 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. 2009. 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, 1509–1512. • http://www.research.ibm.com/visual/papers/viegas_hicss_visual_wikipedia.pdf • "Five-year Traffic Statistics for Wikipedia.org". Alexa Internet. http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/wikipedia.org?range=5y&size=large&y=t. • "Google Traffic To Wikipedia up 166% Year over Year". Hit wise on 2007-02-16. http://weblogs.hitwise.com/leeann-prescott/2007/02/wikipedia_traffic_sources.html. • "Internet encyclopedias go head to head". http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html. The study was cited in several news articles, e.g., "Wikipedia survives research test". BBC News (BBC). December 15, 2005. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4530930.stm. • Wikipedia.org Site Info. Alexa • http://www.howtoknow.com/BOL1.html • http://corporate.britannica.com/about/ • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encarta#cite_note-Encarta2009-0

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