I recently asked Aaron Swartz, who has written about Wikipedia and run for its board of directors, what he thought was wrong with it. Three big things, he said:
1. Failure to value new contributors. A small number of insiders are dismissive of and treat poorly newcomers who contribute. For example, their contributions are deleted without explanation. The insiders see the newcomers as a source of trouble rather than strength.
2. Disorganized and underfunded. It took someone Aaron knows two years to make a deal with Wikipedia. The finances are in bad shape.
3. Lack of vision. Wikipedia could be improved in many ways but actual improvements are rare.
He used to see Wikipedia as just a wonderful thing, he said; now he sees it as a wonderful thing that is falling way short of what it could be.
You seem to be saying someone could come along and start a better open-source encyclopedia, I said. That’s unlikely, he said, Wikipedia is so big.
Who does it better? A similar but vastly better-run website is craigslist, he said. A chart of page view rank and number of employees shows Yahoo at #1 with 10,000 employees, TimeWarner at #2 with 90,000, Google at #3 with 10,000, and so on. Craigslist is #7 with 23 employees.
Addendum: Wikipedia, with very few employees, would of course also rank very high on such a chart; this is the magic of both Wikipedia and craigslist and why it makes sense to compare them. The craigslist link I gave, to a Wall Street Journal article, suggests that craigslist values contributors much more than Wikipedia. Here is what happened at a Wikipedia board of directors meeting that Aaron attended a few years ago:
One presentation was by a usability expert who told us about a study done on how hard people found it to add a photo to a Wikipedia page. The discussion after the presentation turned into a debate over whether Wikipedia should be easy to to use. Some suggested that confused users should just add their contributions in the wrong way and a more experienced users would come along to clean their contributions up. Others questioned whether confused users should be allowed to edit the site at all — were their contributions even valuable?
I think that chart is misleading when you’re trying to compare Wikipedia to Craigslist. That chart is limited to English language rankings, and is probably out of date. The overall rankings (not page view rankings) from Alexa currently have Wikipedia at #9 and Craigslist at #10 for the U.S. Globally,Craigslist is something around #40, while Wikipedia is #8 and serves almost 3 times the page views of Craigslist. Wikipedia also has a much broader constituency; Craigslist has a much higher number of page views per user, but much lower “reach”.
Incidentally, the Wikimedia Foundation has a paid staff of 12. I love Craigslist, but I think this is apples and oranges.
Aaron is certainly right that Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation has some problems (and I respect Aaron’s viewpoint; I voted for him for the board), but I think he’s out of touch with the way things have been going since he disconnected with the community when it comes to points 2 and 3. Organization has been improving rapidly, and funding has more or less kept pace with the organization’s ability to spend it in an organized and effective manner. Yes, many people (myself included) have thrown out big ideas for what we could do if we had the money for it, but the priority has been to create stability first, including a stable funding base. This is much more of a challenge for Wikimedia (a non-profit) than Craigslist (which makes its money from job and housing ads). As for lack of vision, I think Aaron is deeply mistaken here, but I guess it comes down to a judgment call.
Yes, obviously Wikipedia gets a staggering number of page views with a small staff and lots of user-contributed content, just like craigslist. That’s why they’re worth comparing. But if you don’t like that comparison — which is fine — tell me a better one.
If you think Aaron is wrong about lack of vision, it would be helpful to know why.