Wikipedia: The Free Collaborative Encyclopaedia by 50Minutes.com

Author:50Minutes.com
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: 50Minutes.com
Published: 2017-10-19T14:37:42+00:00

The reasons behind Wikipedia’s success

It is difficult to know exactly how this seemingly outlandish project became so successful. What inspired internet users to write about such a variety of subjects and spend hours completing pages or checking information? Apart from intellectual stimulation, on the surface it seems that they gain nothing from their contributions.

However, once the site reached a certain size, it became impossible to ignore. The increasingly widespread instinct to search the internet for answers to the smallest questions or doubts certainly played a role in Wikipedia’s success. Furthermore, most searches on Google, the most widely consulted search engine, place Wikipedia pages towards the top of their results. The site has become even more visible since 2012 with the introduction of Google’s Knowledge Graph: if you type “Charles Dickens” into the search engine, a box containing the first few lines of the author’s Wikipedia page appears on the right-hand side of the results page.

The encyclopaedia’s size is also undoubtedly a factor in its success. The 50 000 articles in the Encyclopaedia Universalis, one of the most respected French encyclopaedias, are dwarfed by the 1.9 million articles available on wikipedia.fr. The free encyclopaedia is helped by the fact that it has an unpaid workforce which can work around the clock and ensure that the site is updated quickly. This means, for example, that there is no need to wait for days or even weeks for an update to indicate that a famous person has died, or been appointed to the Cabinet, and so on.

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