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New Media Life Cycle Analysis
™
September 9, 2009
tippingpointlabs.com
1.
The Wiki
Analysts: Andrew M. Davis, Brad Schwarzenbach
Inside This Report
Each week, the analysts at TippingpointLabs release a New Media Life Cycle™report designed to help marketing professionals understand the new media landscape. These reports use empirical data and a sound methodology to help ad agencies,PR firms, marketing consultants,interactive agencies and chief marketing o
ffi
cers make educated and informed new media decisions.Each report looks at the quality of thecontent on a channel, the state of themedium, an analysis of the life cycle andthe audiences participating on theplatform, the key forces shaping thechannel, a forecast for the channel’s futureand sound content recommendations forparticipating by adding value.
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Looking at Wikipedia and beyond this Tippingpoint Labs New Media Life Cycle Analysis considers the future of the crowd
-
sourced platforms, potential monetiza
-
tion strategies, and o
ff
ers key recommendations for enterprise application andimplementation.
New Media Life Cycle Analysis
™
August 12, 2009
tippingpointlabs.com
2. According to the New York Times, Wikipedia is one of the top fivemost visited websites in the world. With more than 330 million readersand three million English articles it is certainly one of the deepestresources on the Internet.If you’re unfamiliar with Wikipedia, it is a free, web
-
based collaborativeencyclopedia. Basically, users
(
volunteers
)
from around the world addand edit content on any topic and, as a group, validate or delete contentdeemed irrelevant, inaccurate orincorrectly sourced.Wikipedia launched in 2001 and isthe brainchild of Jimmy Wales andLarry Sanger. Today, Wikipedia isthe “largest and most popular general reference work on theinternet.”
(
Wikipedia entry forWikipedia.
)
Wikipedia, however, was not thefirst wiki ever created.WikiWikiWeb was created by Ward Cunningham in 1994 as a way toquickly edit or comment on another’s content on the Internet.It wasn’t until Wikipedia’s launch that wikis began their slow andsteady rise to mainstream adoption. The success of Wikipedia
(
or any wiki for that matter
)
is directly tiedto the passion and activity of a small subset of users who actually contribute and edit content. Even Wikipedia with only 500,000contributors demonstrates that in even the most popular wiki in the world, less than .10
%
of all users actively participate.
■
Channel Overview
Wikipedia Popularizes a Platform & Concept
Analysts: Andrew M. Davis, Brad Schwarzenbach
New Media Life Cycle Analysis
™
August 12, 2009
tippingpointlabs.com
3.Wikipedia has risen to prominence as the definitiveresource of general knowledge on the internet de
-
spite persistent skepticism in the scholastic commu
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nity regarding its accuracy and community
-
drivencontent development model. The wiki model of col
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laboration easily enables community participationbut this also leaves a channel open to manipulationand misuse. And, as Wikipedia has seen, it falls shortof being regarded as a valid scholarly research tool asmany articles don't meet the rigorous fact
-
checking standards of established research tools such as Ency
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clopedia Britannica.
If you can't beat 'em...
Britannica enjoys the esteem and regard of the intel
-
lectual community as a reviewed and acceptable re
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search tool and makes portions of its content avail
-
able online. However, the Britannica channel only makes all of its content available under a subscriptionmodel. Further, it's littered with text and graphicalads. In fact, in response to the Wikipedia hegemony as the Internet's reference guide, in June 2008 Bri
-
tannica announced that it would open the content onBritannica.com to community edits, just likeWikipedia. Their copycat e
ff
orts have been fornaught though as Wikipedia's tra
ffi
c was roughly 43times greater in July 2009.
Community
-
driven content can work
Wikis have established themselves as a great modelfor the aggregation of general knowledge, Wikipedia being the best example. The LyricWiki is anotherexample of a community
-
generated repository of in
-
formation, this time for song lyrics. The inherent value in the model is that it enables engaged users tocreate a resource that, historically, one would have topay for. Instead now, using crowd
-
sourced data, it canbe created and distributed for free. Accuracy, whichhistorically hasn't been viewed by the communitiesas a huge issue, will become one if a wiki is to be con
-
sidered as a truly scholarly resource.
Participating On Wikipedia
If you plan on participating on Wikipedia, you mustlearn their process for validating, editing, sourcing and deleting content. In addition, you must get ac
-
quainted with their wiki markup language. This is noeasy task.We recommend you choose an area in which you canadd value on Wikipedia
-
somewhere where you would be considered an expert. Start by editing orupdating or even challenging an article’s content. If you plan on creating a new page
(
or topic
)
start by copying an existing topic page similar in format tothe one you plan on creating.Launch the topic and make sure you stay on top of any challenges or deletion requests defending yourtopic. This is very di
ffi
cult and time consuming
(
which is one of the reasons participation rates onWikipedia are so low
)
.
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Resource Analsis
Wikipedia Proves Valuable Despite Concerns
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