On Competition for Facebook?

I came across a post on the Allen Stern's CenterNetwork, in which he points to Matthew Buckland in South Africa, where earlier in the week Jimmy Wales made an interesting presentation.

This presentation has added fuel to blogosphere speculation that Jimmy Wales and his "wikia" organisation just might be preparing to take on Facebook and Google.

We shall have to wait and see.

Here are some facts about Wikipedia, highlighted by Wales in his talk.

• "Wales said that by the end of 2007 there were now more than 2-million Wikipedia articles in english, but that this is less than 1/3 of the wikipedia content.
• German and French are two big growing languages with more than 500,000 articles each.
• Wikipedia spent around US$1-millon last year, and will spend about $2,3-million this year. Most of this comes from small donations and is a tiny amount of money if you think of the influence Wikipedia has on the world.
• Wales says that according to Alexa, Wikipedia is now the 8th most popular website in the world.
• Even in countries like Iran, Wikipedia is the 14th most popular site.
• Despite Wikipedia being one of the world’s top ten biggest websites, it only has 10 fulltime positions, with most of the work done by volunteers all around the world."

As you think about those facts, watch anonymous editors at work at Wikipedia on this interesting mashup / visualisation.

The wisdom of the crowd in action!