Competing against Free Wikipedia Faces down Encyclopedia Britannica The record a

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Competing against Free Wikipedia Faces down Encyclopedia Britannica The record and movie industries are not the only in- dustries to find themselves affected by free access to their products. Encyclopedia Britannica faces chal- lenges by a nonprofit competitor that provides its services without charge or advertising, Wikipedia.org. Wikipedia depends on volunteers to create and edit original content under the condition contributors provide their work without copyright.

Who would work for free? During its cre- ation in the 19th century, the Oxford English Dictionary editors solicited word articles and ref- erences from the general public. In the 20th cen- tury, AOL.com found thousands of volunteers to monitor its chat rooms. Amazon.com coaxed more than 100,000 readers to post book reviews on its retail Web site. Outdoing them all in the 21st cen- tury, Wikipedia published its 1,000,000th English language article in March 2006. Wikipedia in- cludes more than 2,000,000 articles in more than 200 languages, all created and edited by more than 4,800,000 million users.

Can Wikipedia compete on quality? Wikipedia provides its users with both editing and moni- toring tools. This allows users to self-police. Wikipedia also uses voluntary administrators who block vandals, temporarily protect articles, and manage arbitration processes when disputes arise. A paper published by Nature in December 2005 evaluated 50 Wikipedia articles and found an aver- age of four factual errors per Wikipedia article as compared with an average of three errors per arti- cle in the Encyclopedia Britannica. More signifi- cantly, Wikipedians (as the volunteers call themselves) corrected each error by January 2006. Alexa.com rated Wikipedia.com as the 17th most visited Web site on the Internet, while Britannica.com came in 2,858th place (Yahoo and Google ranked in first and second place).

Wikipedia has already built on its success. In addition to offering foreign language encyclope- dias, it also provides a common media archive (commons.wikimedia.org), a multilingual diction- ary (www.wiktionary.org), and a news service (www.wikinews.org).

One of the latest Wikipedia projects is Wikiver- sity, a Web site devoted to free learning, Web educa- tion, open educational resources, and collaborative learning communities (www.wikiversity.com).

A. How does the Wikimedia Foundation meet the criteria for a knowledge-creating organization?

B. How would you recommend that Encyclope- dia Britannica adapt to this new threat?

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Competing against Free Wikipedia Faces down Encyclopedia Britannica The record a

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