Futurist Thomas Frey: At what point will Wikipedia no longer matter? I’m going to go out on a limb here, but I predict a competitor will emerge to steal the majority of both mindshare and eyeballs from Wikipedia within the next ten years.
No, I’m not saying this because they don’t have a sustainable business model, and no, it’s not because the information on Wikipedia is not credible. Rather, they, like the encyclopedias they helped put out of business, will be upended by a company with better ways of aggregating information. They too will become irrelevant.
This may seem rather ironic to predict the demise of the world’s best known crowd sourced encyclopedia at the same time most people are finally recognizing the value and utility of its content. Yet it is their overarching pursuit of perfection and internal drive for credibility that will be their undoing over the coming years.
At the DaVinci Institute, with the help of our CU student intern David Baur-Ray, we began a series of Wikipedia research projects to uncover “what’s missing,” and the results are very telling. Two of the tests showed well over 50% of important content entries either missing or incomplete, and by another measure, over 95% missing.
Missing content is in direct correlation to the relevancy Wikipedia will hold in the minds of people in the future. It is also a clear signal to startup entrepreneurs that a new opportunity awaits. He’s how I came to this conclusion.
Wikipedia Goes Main Stream
Started in 2001 by Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia is now in its 10th year of operation with the number of articles in its 10 primary language versions approaching 10 million entries. They represent the 4th largest web property on the Internet attracting 150 million unique visitors a month.
Recent headlines would seem to indicate the exact opposite trend to what I am predicting. Here are a few recent ones:
* BBC – “Hundreds of Medical GPs admit to using the website Wikipedia as a medical research tool”
* Washington Post – “National Archives hires 1st ‘Wikipedian in Residence’ to connect with Internet encyclopedia”
* New York Times – “Worthy Online Resource, but Global Cultural Treasure?”
* Times of India – “Wikipedia seeks UNESCO recognition”
* Chronicle of Higher Education – “Academics, in New Move, Begin to Work With Wikipedia”
With doctors, educators and the UN staffers listing themselves as avid users, it’s as if the world has finally woken up to the inherent value of Wikipedia as a solid source of information.
But perhaps the most telling sign that the end is near comes from the last one. When the perennial late-adopters in academia start to recognize its importance, it’s a clear sign that Wikipedia has lost its ability to continue as a disruptive enterprise.
In the constantly changing tombs of Wikipedia, now boasting over 1 billion individual edits to the entries, the question we were confronted with was, “How can we apply relevancy metrics to this type of business model?”
