The Wikipedia Wonder
The other day I was lucky enough to see Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, speak in London at the Exact Target Connections Conference.
Wales spoke about the power of one and how both content creation and consumption within Wikipedia exist to empower an individual.
It occurred to me during his session that Wikipedia has the potential to become a very powerful trends analysis tool. Wikipedia is already providing an interesting cultural view of content consumption – for example: well over half of all Japanese language articles viewed are related to pop culture; and the French and Spanish do a good deal more ‘reading’ about sex than English or Americans.
Thinking about trends analysis further, we know that history is typically written by the victor and that at numerous points in our past masses of content has been lost – yet for all it’s digital fragility and theoretical transience, Wikipedia seems to have attained a stage of relative content permanency.
For me, this is an opportunity to measure and map our perception of ourselves and of our history, but we shouldalso commit to tracking this change over time.
Currently, 87% of content articles on Wikipedia are created by males. While not surprising, Wales said that it is a priority to correct.
As a strategist I see a long term role for Wikipedia – where it can observe itself and thus make comment on social change and human attitudes over time.
Wikipedia is full of articles that once written and agreed should theoretically have no need for change, however I suspect they will. Any change to these types of articles will reflect a change in our own (global) collective attitude or social viewpoint. Wouldn’t it be interesting to track the aggregate attitude to content as the nature of content creation changes, for example plot the changes as the percentage of female content creators and administrators increases to 25% and then onto 50%.
There are endless changes that will occur that will impact and in some cases rewrite history, politics and religion being the two most obvious.
Instances of change documentation have already commenced. James Bridle has created an encyclopaedia of the US / Iraq War, but the difference is the entire encyclopedia is a time based view of how the war was documented within Wikipedia and how the nature of the content evolved over the duration of the war.
Check it out: http://booktwo.org/notebook/wikipedia-historiography/
This is definitely an exciting and unprecedented time for knowledge and it will be the first time creation of records can be easily tracked and visualised as the changing beast it is and the distortion of our history will be better understood.
I love the web!
