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!

On statistics (again!)

Lee Le Fever at Common Craft Blog (the people that brought us the outstanding RSS in Plain English and Wikis in Plain English videos) points at some interesting statistics produced by Harris Interactive for Wet Paint an American wiki company.

"16% of the US online population is familiar with what a wiki is.
Even if you just look at the online trendsetters (18-34 year olds), only 27% of those online users are familiar with wikis.
Blogs, which have universal awareness among nearly anyone reading this post, are only familiar to 35% of online users. And familiarity with social networks as a category still ranks below that of online forums at 28% and 35% respectfully.
For context, consider that 76% of the same population know of search engines and 97% of toilet paper."

These figures are confusing.

Given the hype and publicity around wikipedia, how is it that the wiki recognition figure is so low?
How can it be that only 76% of the same population know of search engines?
What context does that provide?

My informal observations of students and academics confirm what Lee suggests.

"We're making assumptions about what people understand about our online world. There is more misunderstanding than understanding and more confusion than solution."

Where are the digital natives?
Not in my college!

On Using Wikipedia

Congratulations to Dr. Nicola Pratt and her postgraduate politics students at the University of East Anglia who are using Wikipedia in an original and exciting way.

The students edit Wikipedia articles and then research and create new articles as part of their studies. In preparing for weekly seminars the students are expected to refine exisitng Wikipedia articles. After eight weeks editing experience the students submit their own article to Wikipedia.

This activity works at so many levels. I have heard and read of students creating and contributing to class wikis, but this project encourages students to engage in real scholarship, resulting in new information that adds to the sum of global knowledge.

These students will experience writing for a purpose for a specific audience and will develop critical thinking skills. Their research grounded in real world issues encourages collaboration not only with their peers but also with the world wide community of Wikipedia users. Crucially their work which is assessed by the University, is also subject to the critical review of other users of Wikipedia.

It seems that Dr. Pratt would like to extend her pilot scheme to include undergraduates. This would be a worthwhile extension of the project and could be employed in other subject disciplines. Engaging undergrads in the creation of knowledge, instead of providing them with facts could offer us many opportunities to encourage reflection, deep learning and increased student engagement.

While researching this entry I discovered that Wikipedia actively encourages school and university projects, and provides guidance, templates and links to several other projects.

Interesting reading!