Correcting WIkipedia's distorted mirror on the world

We had friends over last week, and at one point the discussion drifted to Wikipedia. The husband is an adjunct and asked me what my policy was (after 14+ years of teaching) on using Wikipedia as a reference.

Wikipedia used to emphasize that it is a tertiary source — a compilation created from of primary and secondary sources — and thus is not an authoritative reference. However, today it appears to be less modest and more into bragging. Due to its price and comprehensiveness, Wikipedia has become the first (if not only) reference for the Internet generation.

Certainly Wikipedia is suitable for resolving a bar wager: the sort of questions that people used to argue about are now easily settled via Wikipedia (or via more specialized and authoritative sources such as IMDB).

It’s also well known that the Wikipedia mechanisms do not prevent the intentional fabrication of lies, whether it be libel (falsely accusing a political figure of conspiring to kill JFK) or false history (the so-called Bicholim Conflict). No process will ever prevent this — any more than a library can prevent cutting pages from books on open stacks — but the processes seem to eventually identify these problems and correct them. It also appears that true experts (e.g. actual scientists) will check key topics and make sure that the most egregious factual errors get corrected.

The remaining problem is the distorted mirror of American and other societies that Wikipedia presents to the world and to posterity. (By sheer weight of population. en.wikipedia.org is clearly dominated by the American perspective, and the English articles outnumber the next three languages combined.).

By nature of its contributors — on average younger and with more free time than the average Internet user — Wikipedia has a social, cultural and political bias of its contributors versus the rest of society. In particular, these authors demonstrate a pre-occupation with contemporary popular culture over other (more enduring or important) aspects of human knowledge: not everyone can write about string theory, but just about anyone can summarize a Simpsons episode.

And thus Beyoncé Knowles has a 36-page entry, and the late Michael Jackson, 49 pages. John Lennon warrants only 20 pages, but the Beatles have 38 and Elvis 45. Charlie Chaplain merits 35 pages, versus 20 pages for Rembrandt, 19 for Beethoven and 17 for Mozart.

By way of comparison, the most famous scientist of the 20th century, Albert Einstein, rates only 29 pages. Other 20th century Nobelists include Niels Bohr (who gave us the atom) with 14 pages, Enrico Fermi (who split the atom) 16 pages, and Wilhelm Röntgen (who won the first Nobel prize for discovering x-rays) with 5 pages. Martin Luther (who changed the course of European history) had 32 pages, Charlemagne 36 pages (but only 24 pages in German) and Henry VIII has 30 pages.

Overall, the depth of coverage of major figures seems adequate. But, lacking limits on resources (either to generate content or in printing it) the coverage of trivial topics balloons far beyond all reasonable measure.

Exhibits A-Z are the coverage of cult favorite American TV shows such as South Park or the Simpsons. South Park has 28 pages, but then another 17 pages listing all the episodes. More significantly, there is a 3-10 page entry for each of 237 episodes aired across 16 seasons (thus far). One US TV show with a run of nearly two decades — which will be forgotten a century from now — merits 1000+ pages, more “ink” than all the major painters or composers of 500 years of European history combined.

If journalism is the first draft on history, now Wikipedia offers the first draft of a comprehensive encyclopedia that could, in the end, crowd out all other records of our contemporary society. The result is what one would expect if archeologists centuries from now tried to assess the 20th or 21st century from uncovered copies of US Weekly or videos of “Entertainment Tonight.”

I'm somewhat optimistic that the problem can be corrected in this century, because there are millions of people who have the knowledge to correct these distortions. It’s not some core problem of economics (Wikipedia demonstrates this) or scarcity, but merely a matter of incentives. Right now, people who actually know something that’s scarce have no incentive to give it away in an anonymous crowdsourced encyclopedia, but instead seek course credit, (less and less often) to sell it for publication or generate academic reputation through peer reviewed journals.

Google’s dead knol experiment was one attempt to create a new production community. Still, the sheer volume of excess available labor suggests that there will be other attempts. In particular, if there were a way that students or professors got credit for term paper-quality original contributions shared on the Web, we might have a more coherent (and representative) picture than what what Wikipedia presents to the world.

The MIT-spawned BioBricks Foundation is crowdsourcing synthetic biology components through its annual iGem competition, drawing on a far more skilled and specialized knowledge base than Western history . (Similarly, MIT’s Open Courseware has spawned a wave of free online university course content). This implies even one visionary university could lead us to a new model of knowledge generation.

We deserve better commodity information

It’s no news that Wikipedia, with all its flaws, is the default information source of a generation of skulls full of mush. If this wasn’t obvious enough from my college students, it was brought home a week ago when interviewing FLL robotics contestants (ages 9-14), when nearly all said their project “research” consisted of Google and Wikipedia. (One team said Google and Yahoo).

However, since then, Wikipedia’s problem has been a front page Wall Street Journal story Monday (and blog entry) on how Wikipedia is losing volunteers, specifically 49,000 in Q1 2009. The Telegraph had the most comprehensive follow up stories although the Times of London had good coverage (including a great article on the four sources of error.)

The impetus for the original WSJ article was the academic research of Felipe Ortega, who is part of a group studying open source software but actually did his Ph.D. dissertation on Wikipedia (a related but quite different species). He’s been tweeting to offer his comment on the current news coverage. While the bulk of his research hasn’t gone through the peer review, the abstract suggests he’s taken seriously all the research design issues.

After all the articles and the academic study, the official Wikipedia response is pretty unsatisfactory. It changes the subject, arguing that while the tide of new volunteers roughly matches the ongoing losses, at least the site traffic and number of articles continue to grow.

However, none of this relates to two inherent problems in Wikipedia that the current management is unable to solve, plus the third (and potentially catastrophic) outcome of WIkipedia’s commoditization of information.

The first problem is that Wikipedia publishes content by persistent idiots. Now that there are dozens or thousands of individuals trying edit articles on almost any topic, there are chronic edit wars with rival editors taking out each other’s changes in edit wars.

Competition is healthy — if there’s a selection mechanism based on quality or performance. Wikipedia has no such mechanism. Instead, what gets published comes from people who whine and bitch and moan, who win out over people who know what they’re talking about but have better things to do with their life. This works well for chronicling Simpsons episodes but not for summarizing academic research or major historical controversies. (Yes, I know that there are capable contributors, but in every battle between idiots and experts, the idiots are winning.)

I tried to sell this angle to a reporter I spoke with Monday, but I guess he thought it was just the griping of a snobby college professor who gave up years ago after watching his work be mangled by twits. However, in the 27 comments (thus far) to the official Wikipedia response were these five comments:

1. Well, I have taken hours editing and polishing a biographical article about a scientist. There is nothing in the article now that is under dispute, yet it is probably going to be taken down and deleted as one editor is exercising his or hers petty power-plays.
2. My most recent experiences have been quite negative: edits reverted with no reason, pages tagged as grammatically terrible when they were no such thing, or tagged as “not up to WP’s standards” when they were stubs and in some cases *still editing*. These taggings tended to be “drive-by” in the sense that some other editor dropped the tag onto the page or made their reversion but then failed to respond to explanations on the talk page for days.
3. I used to spend a lot of time writing for Wikipedia, amending entries and creating new articles. Now it seems that a small number of self-appointed editors run the site. If I create new articles then they are nearly always deleted. If I correct information I know for a fact is wrong, it is reverted back and I am warned by the small sub class of elite editors
4. I took on editing the Albigensian Crusade page a while back, a fairly simple job because what’s known about it comes principally from three contemporary chronicles dealing with the specific subject. A chronicle is self-indexed by time, therefore it should have been adequate to simply point readers in the direction of the sources, but no, that was inadequate, full references please. I got started, went so far, and checked if this was right. The %*$^^@# responsible refused to take the time to feedback, and was quite rude about it, so I stopped. Other appeals to administration went nowhere, and I concluded this is a system full of chiefs who can’t be bothered to get their hands dirty actually editing,
5. I, for one, am one of those professional contributors who left Wiki in disgust. After spending a lot of time creating pages or adding a lot of content, some amateur came along and dumbed down the content and added fictious pictures that were purported to be of the creatures listed. It became a waste of my time to provide a lot of information that could be cut-and-paste into term papers, dissertations, reports, etc., and have some arm-chair contributor wreck it all.

This is a problem I’ve known about since soon after I joined Wikipedia in November 2003. The entire production process would have to be ripped up to fix this. Even Amazon has a way of providing feedback on user contributions so that readers know whose comments have been useful, even if it (and other processes) is fatally broken for highly polarized topics like politics.

One problem I didn’t see coming was the inevitable shift from original writing to maintenance mode. I started my main burst of Wikipedia contributions (2003-2004) by creating 11 new articles, from venture capitalists Eugene Kleiner and Tom Perkins to adding two missing campuses (CSULB, CSUSM) of the 23-campus CSU system.

Today, thanks to the law of large numbers (and the long tail) are very few significant articles left to be written. (Yes, Wikipedia has an article on only one Joel West — and it’s a lame one — but I don’t consider that a major omission.)

This reminds me of what I experienced in my first few years as a professional programmer: it is so much more more fun to write new code than maintain someone else’s code. In fact, as I became a manager I learned this is a major recruiting and staffing problem — even when you pay people, let alone when they’re volunteers. Over and over again, I saw that the manager or other “stuck” (high switching cost) programmers had to take the scut work so you could offer the new exciting stuff to attract the best talent.

Clearly, at Wikipedia existing volunteers don’t want to do the scut work, nor do the newcomers. If it’s de minimus, then (to use an analogy) perhaps good citizens will just pitch in and pick up the candy wrapper, but nobody’s going to spend a weekend clearing up the trash along the highway just for the fun of it.

Wikipedia is running out of good jobs to hand out. If you can’t give out fun work, how are you going to attract people? What I didn’t see six years ago was that inevitably Wikipedia’s content base would mature: first in English and eventually in all the major languages. When this happened, the opportunities for adding new content would mainly be limited to current events like new hurricanes or those Simpsons episodes.

However, I find hope in Wikipedia’s current troubles, as they suggest a solution WIkipedia’s most invidious problem: the commoditization of human knowledge. Monopolies are bad, even if they are for free goods. When I was interviewing open source leaders, the Apache (and most “open source” types) seemed to get this, while the free software types (Linux, OpenOffice) did not.

Competition is inefficient, but it provides choice. Monopolies at best mean benevolent dictators, and few benevolent dictators remain benevolent forever.

The mind-numbing ubiquity of WIkipedia is teaching a generation of kids to be lazy and uncritical consumers of information — whether it’s truth or merely wikitruth. They take what shows up on the first page of Google or in Wikipedia and assumes it’s true, even when it’s not.

When I was a kid, I would do my 5th grade reports using World Book, Encyclopedia Brittanica, usually one other encyclopedia like Collier’s or Compton’s, and also the Information Please Almanac. (If the report was important, I would also try to find a real book or two.) This wouldn’t make me an expert, but at least I would get multiple perspectives.

Today, Wikipedia’s commoditization of information means that Encyclopedia Britannica is struggling and its previous nemesis (the Encarta CD-ROM) is gone. At least a five-year-old version of the Columbia Encyclopedia survives as Reference.com.

Once upon a time, I assumed that the network effects meant that nothing would ever compete with Wikipedia. This week shows that in less than a decade it’s possible to create a significant body of knowledge with volunteer labor. None of the existing rivals have yet succeeded, whether Citizendium, Conservapedia, Liberapedia or Knol. However, with this large body of existing (or potential) body of would-be Wikipedia labor becoming available, they are certainly trying.

I will be curious to see if we can achieve success from volunteer organizations that focus on the quality rather than the quantity of contributions. In this direction, Citizendium (by WIkipedia co-founder Larry Sanger) is using a somewhat modified version of the Wikipedia process, while Google’s Knol is heading in a different direction by emphasizing authorial integrity over cumulative production.

Given the almost total lack of competition, anything that provides a viable alternative to WIkipedia is a good thing. It will be a good thing if a decade from now we have three or four online encyclopedias to choose from, much as today we can choose from three or four cellphone carriers.

It’s likely that one of these alternatives will be Wikipedia. Perhaps if its leaders take its current problems seriously, it will still be the most popular alternative out there and will be able to meet its current modest fundraising goals.

A positive spin on Wikipedia chaos

Maverick Sen. John McCain’s selection of maverick Gov. Sarah Palin caused a lot of confusion in political and journalism circles Friday. As with other events, it sent a lot of people to Wikipedia to learn more.

One of those going to Wikipedia was Mercury columnist Chris O’Brien, who’s become their most insightful tech columnist since Dean Takahashi jumped ship earlier this year.

O’Brien used his own curiosity and a major news event to study (informally) how a previously little-known topic becomes elaborated by cooperative information production. As he reported

As I write this late Friday afternoon, there had already been more than 1,200 edits to her entry. What I saw unfold over the course of the day was a chaotic, complex, messy process, but one that ultimately led to an article that was far longer and deeper.

Wikipedia tends to push people's buttons. Founded in 2001, the online encyclopedia allows anyone to edit articles, relying on the wisdom of the crowd to contribute and to improve the amount and quality of information. I've found that people either see this as a symbol of what's best about the Web, or a sign that society no longer cares about accuracy and expertise.

I saw the frenzy around Palin's entry as an interesting test case. While she had a decent-size entry before Friday, she was hardly a major public figure. So there was plenty left unsaid there, plenty of gaps to be filled in.

Eventually, as with other controversial topics on Wikipedia, the website had too many contributions — and too many distortions and fights — and thus had to ban anonymous contributions to the Palin WikiPedia entry.

It used to be that Wikipedia marked prominently that a page was partially or totally “locked down” by administrators. Today, if you go to a page (without signing in to Wikipedia) on a controversial topic — like Palin, abortion, the Iraq war — the “edit this page” option is missing, unlike the entries for Michael Palin, adoption, or the Iran-Iraq War.

O’Brien seems to see a positive side in Wikipedia’s ability to deal with a sudden interest in the one-term Alaska governor.

Reading the article, it is very detailed and — from what I can see — relatively balanced. Here’s two sentences that are better (in terms of clarity and neutrality) than one often sees nowadays from the AP, once the gold standard in fairness:

Palin has strongly promoted oil and natural gas resource development in Alaska, despite concerns from environmentalists. She also helped pass a tax increase on oil company profits

In some other places, there is subtle editorializing by juxtaposing two facts together, even though the individual sentences are neutral. This is hardly unique to this page (or Wikipedia), although it probably wouldn’t be found in a professional encyclopedia.

It appears that the Palin entry has drawn a wide range of supporters and critics, and that by a very labor-intensive intervention, Wikipedia administrators have shaped a comprehensive (and relatively fair and accurate) profile in a very short period of time. O’Brian sees this as a good thing.

I think the jury is still out. The challenge for Wikipedia has always been in the thinly-populated pages, where any bozo (or any group of bozos) can say what they want and not get detected — or use their persistence to shout down people who actually know something.

The Siegenthaler libel is a serious example of this problem. My own unsuccessful fight (as a business historian) over the misleading use of “Fairchildren” (in a page I created) caused me to quit Wikipedia. It is (slightly) reassuring that the edit war is over and that the current discussion is relatively accurate in how it presents the various claimed uses of the term.

Of course, I recognize that — along with professional journalists, librarians and a small minority of Americans who profess to care about the “truth” — I’m on the losing end of a sysyphean fight against Wikipedia as being “good enough.” The Internet and a wide range of volunteer wiki contributors, bloggers, citizen journalists or whatever you want to call them are fueling the commoditization of information.

A decade ago, then UCI professor Yannis Bakos showed that competition for information goods (i.e. those goods with a zero duplication or distribution cost) will reduce the price to zero. So much of for the value of the accurate, professionally-developed encyclopedia of my childhood.

Britannica in search of a business model

Encyclopedia Britannica is in a life-or-death battle of quality vs. commodity, and so far commodity has won every round. In the past 10 days, both Wired and the Merc have reported that its latest plan is: if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

The wonderful Merc article by Lisa Krieger spells out the details: sales of the once invincible Britannica dead tree edition peaked in 1990, and the vaunted door-to-door sales team got the axe in 1996.

About the only thing it left out is what happened in between — how the bookshelf of paper got supplanted by the CD-ROM encyclopedia: first, Microsoft’s Encarta, then EB’s World Book, and now its own CD-ROM edition. Of course, the potential audience for a $30 CD (now DVD) is a lot greater than for a $1400 shelf worth of paper.

More recently, the problem is Wikipedia, the free user-generated content that has more articles of lesser quality at no cost. A discussion of the relative merits of EB and Wikipedia is worthy of a journal paper — actually several — but after presenting at Wikimania back in 2006, I realized that I’m not going to have time to write one.

I used to contribute to Wikipedia but got tired of wasting time arguing with people who don’t know what they’re talking about who decided to “fix” my (economic historian’s) contributions. Suffice it to say that I use Wikipedia (it’s cheap and convenient), but never trust it due to its flawed production process. For example, the article on Symbian lists two companies as “founder shareholders” who didn’t come in until months later, something that takes about 2 minutes with the NYT (or WSJ or FT) database to verify.

However, as with other commodization, Britannica is finding it can’t compete with free. (Perhaps Chris Anderson will offer some advice in his new book). Its demonstrably better quality is preferred by serious researchers, librarians and even a few teachers, but today’s K-12 schools are raising a generation of dolts who think looking something up in Wikipedia (or even on the free Internet) constitutes research. I know, because I get them when they turn 20, and have to teach them what real research is — not always succeeding at the task.

Britannica has yet to solve its fundamental problem of not creating enough value that people are willing to pay for it, other than competing with Microsoft in the DVD-ROM market. However, this month Wired and Merc reported that Britannica would start supplementing its professional content with outside contributors. Unlike Wikipedia (but as with Google) its contributors would have qualifications beyond just being able to type like a room full of monkeys. This seems like it will ultimately be as successful as hybrid open source strategies (i.e. not), but I can see they have to try something.

As an author, I am so there — to be able to write on a few topics where I’m one of a small number of experts in the world and not have to worry about vandals. (Linkabit? Open source business models?) However, I could find no evidence of the new program on the Britannica website, or news coverage beyond these two articles (or direct copies). So either it was a trial balloon, vaporware, or it’s in private beta.

Even if they go live, over the next two months I have five more papers to finish up (all but one co-authored) and send off to journals. That leaves no time for EB, and probably less time than usual for the blog(s).

Communitarian content and operational ineptness

Regular readers know I have mixed feelings about Wikipedia. On the one hand, I think its model — biased towards maximum participation, minimal quality control — leads to highly variable quality, especially on obscure topics. On the other hand, it is an extremely useful resource — particularly for settling a party bet, even if I forbid my students from using it as a primary source (because it’s not).

Some of the strongest criticisms of Wikipedia have come from the online tech magazine The Register. Two weeks ago, they ran a long saga about how Wikipedia blocked the IP addresses of an entire community to prevent one man from making edits to four articles. This week, SF-based Cade Metz summarized the inherent Catch-22 of Wikipedia’s conflict of interest policies:

In Wikiland, you aren't allowed to edit articles where you have a conflict of interest. If you do so, you could be grounded. But the inhabitants of Wikiland also have the right to anonymity. This means that no one may ever know if you have a conflict of interest.

Taken separately, these two pillars of the Wikipedia law book are sure to ring a few bells. At least once a month, a news story appears in which some self-serving organization is slapped for violating Wikipedia's conflict of interest policy. This month, it's the BBC wearing the dunce cap.

And, naturally, we all realize that Wikipedia is a place where you needn't identity yourself. At the very least, this hit home in March when cyber sleuths revealed that a 24-year-old uber-Wikipedian was masquerading as a professor of theology with not one, but two PhDs.

But few seem to realize that these two Wikicommandments are completely incompatible. The trouble with Wikipedia goes deeper than a few edits from the BBC, deeper even than a 24-year-old pretending to be someone he's not.

OK, that a few self-appointed leaders of a volunteer group can be petty and self-serving is no great surprise. That it continues in such a big and highly visible nonprofit is a little more surprising.

But what sent me to The Register was a very odd report in the AP that acknowledged the earlier Register story. Both were about the recent Wikimedia Foundation COO who was a convicted felon — bad checks, shooting her boyfriend and a fatal hit-and-run. The articles questioned whether poor administrative controls would hurt the foundation’s current fundraising push (supported by banner ads on every article in more than a dozen languages).

At one level, this comes as no surprise. Founder Jimmy Wales has always made it clear that he’s a big idea man not interested in sweating the details.

But on the other hand, it's yet another depressing indictment of the lack of accountability common in the nonprofit sector. Big nonprofits are notorious for high overheads, lax controls and weak oversight. Exhibit A are the repeated scandals at the American Red Cross, which blogger Hildy Gottlieb attributes to a lack of vision and values. (Which is not a problem at the ARC's more effective rival).

Society needs nonprofits to address a wide range of cultural, educational and material needs. But the successful ones seem to be created by institutional entrepreneurs with a strong vision and leadership ability, and (often) taken over by bureaucrat-managers who need a paycheck. Ineptly run companies go out of business, or at least have their shareholders fire the lame executives and replace them with new ones. The measure of success for nonprofits are so ill-defined, and the oversight so weak, that it appears that even the mediocre nonprofits take on a life of their own.

Earlier this month, a Salvation Army blogger in Australia perfectly captured this with a Peter Drucker quote:

An organisation begins to die the day it begins to be run for the benefit of the insiders and not for the benefit of outsiders.

Wikipedia was a huge success in user-generated, community-owned content long before its foundation began its fundraising drive. It can't let the fundraising overtake its original goal of publishing a free encyclopedia. It should limit its fundraising to keeping the servers running and avoiding mission creep (not bloody likely), but given its large amount of volunteer labor and original shoestring budget, the online encyclopedia will probably continue no matter how badly run the nonprofit is.

Make way for Googlepedia

The best job in the world must be acting as chief strategy officer for Google. Every month you get to come out with a new initiative for Total World Domination, while at the same time positioning as an improvement for Google customers and the Internet economy as a whole. Being chief economist of Google would also be fun, but there you have to crunch the numbers, and I’d rather paint in broad strokes and leave the implementation to others.

Over the weekend, the dead tree news delivery vehicle was talking about “Googlepedia,” Google’s answer to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia was arguably the first breakaway hit of user-generated content on the web. By Tim O’Reilly’s definition, that would make it a Web 2.0 success before “Web 2.0” had been coined. It has achieved its goal of unprecedented scope for any reference source, but its inclusiveness has brought inherent (perhaps irreparable) quality problems, particularly in the less-trafficked entries (which of course provide that broad scope). My own experience with contributions — with some people making my work better and some making it worse — mirror the problems of Wikipedia as a whole.

Google is planning a different model. In the official Google blog, its VP of engineering Udi Manber wrote

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling "knol", which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. ...

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors' names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors -- but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. ...

A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read. The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions. Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content. All editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors.

So this is a completely different approach to producing content — initially commissioned (solicited) articles and later (presumably) expert-written by a broader audience. This would certainly address the problem that current Wikipedia articles tend not to have a coherent tone or perspective.

However, Manber admits Google may not completely solve the (inherent) quality problem of user-generated contented:

The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. ... Once testing is completed, participation in knols will be completely open, and we cannot expect that all of them will be of high quality. Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results.

So picture Slate (Slashdot?) type magazine articles with Amazon-type user feedback. (The domain name “knol” isn’t available, apparently because it means “turnip” in Dutch).

I’m would expect that Googlepedia would be a great source of anxiety for founder Jimmy Wales and his Wikimaniac volunteers — a head-on threat, unlike Conservapedia, which serves a tiny niche market of American home school parents upset at the leftist bias of the mainstream media and some parts of Wikipedia. Googlepedia has more resources than another project attempting to fix Wikipedia’s inherent flaws — Citizendium, by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger. (Sanger himself is skeptical of Knol).

But in the AP story (carried by my paper), Wales gave a flip answer:

In a Friday interview, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales downplayed Google's latest move. "Google does a lot of cool stuff, but a lot of that cool stuff doesn't work out so great," he said.

Organizations that underestimate Google tend to go out of business or at least fade into oblivion. Wikipedia is better established than that, but I still think they should worry.

The Business of Blogging Software

I started in 2007 resolute in my vow to never become a blogger. All that changed last week in my SJSU course on entrepreneurship, when the topic was business models.

Since my own research is about open source business models, I thought I'd offer students an example of a current startup pursuing a business model that includes open source. For my technology strategy class, I've explicitly taught my current research on open source business models, but that's more detail on open source than appropriate for this class.

For Saturday's class, my idea was to look at the wiki or blogging software companies that release their software as open source. By Friday, I'd signed up for 5 free services — 2 for wikis and 3 for blogs. I also created 3 blogs on 2 services. I thought trying the software would be a good way to learn about the business (or at least that was my rationalization).

My original interest was piqued by Wikia, the company co-founded by Jimbo Wales using the MediaWiki technology developed for Wikipedia. As a speaker at the Wikimania conference last August, I heard Wales talk about his company and its 2006 relaunch.

The problem is, does Wikia have a business model? I study this sort of thing for a living, and right now I just don’t get it. Of course I like open business models, but if you don't capture value somehow, how do you pay the bills? (And are banner ads alone enough?)

So I spent a day checking out various wiki and blogging startups, including the two (JotSpot and Pyra Labs) purchased by Google. As a teaching case, I decided to use Socialtext, because at least their revenue model is pretty clear.

What did we conclude? The exit strategy here is tricky; 5 years from now there isn't going to be a stand-alone blogging software market and probably not one for wikis either. This is all an economies of scope play (as defined by Panzar & Willig back in the 1970s).

Now that Google has one of each, are they done buying? And once MSN and Yahoo have dance partners, what will happen to the remaining belles of the ball? It doesn't sound like a Cinderella ending.