I was around for some of the early ‘volunteer’ projects on the web. One of the earliest was the Open Directory Project (ODP) which attenpted to use volunteers to build a directory of the web. This created the ealry finding tools that were employed by Yahoo and AOL and preceded the relevancy ranking search engines like Alta Vista and Google. Google killed its directory project this week. Yahoo hasn’t really been a full directory for years and its search facility is run by MS Bing. The ODP has lapsed into obscurity as the people interested in it gradually lost, well, interest.
I was hopeful that Wikimedia had discovered the magic sauce for sustaining free volunteer effort. Maybe they have if their tweaks to their non-profit business model work. So this cNET news is distressing:
Wikipedia losing contributors, to streamline editing
“Wikipedia is trying to simplify its editing procedures in response to declining numbers of contributors, founder Jimmy Wales said on the sidelines of an annual meeting today. The user-generated online encyclopedia has been unable to attract new volunteer contributors after others stop helping out.
“We are not replenishing our ranks,” the Associated Press quoted Wales as saying at the meeting in Haifa, Israel. “It is not a crisis, but I consider it to be important.””
Read more.
Given that Wikipedia is one of the tools used by the relevancy engines in their algorithmic models it would be a shame on many fronts if the quality or quantity of content declined or failed to improve. It is a valuable part of the web ecosystem.
Stephen
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What is your take on paid contribution?
Since I work for one of the largest (and most successful) print and electronic encyclopedia publishers in the world I suppose I am pretty for it. They pay my bills and this model has been around for much longer than Wikipedia! There’s plenty of room for all models – ad supported, subscription supported and sponsored.
SA