A variety of fascinating new wikis have appeared in recent months, suggesting that the power of this platform for ubiquitous participation is only beginning to be seen. It is also a sign that the make-your-own culture is taking off, a theme that finds support in other developments that I will discuss tomorrow
The granddaddy of all wikis, of course, is Wikipedia, the free, user-created encyclopedia that is now available in dozens of languages. The English version has 640,902 articles and 338,079 registered users, and is one of the most heavily trafficked sites on the Web. There are now more than 1,000 public wiki communities. While some of these are wikipedias for different languages, the wiki platform is also migrating into entirely new types of collaborative work.
One of the fast-growing new wikis is wikiHow, “the how-to manual that anyone can write or edit.” If you want to learn how to install a car stereo, how to choose the right divorce lawyer, or how to convince your mother to let you buy a horse, this is the place to go. It is interesting that wikiHow used to be a corporate website with proprietary content. As Ross Mayfield writes on the Many 2 Many blog (July 4), a company called eHow spent $30 million during the dot-com boom developing a base of content, but went bankrupt in 2001.
After a second company failed to turn a profit on the site, two entrepreneurs set out to revive it as a labor of love. They transformed it into a free wiki, eventually abandoning restrictive copyright licenses and instead relying on Creative Commons licenses for the “how to” contributions. Six months later, a user base of hundreds of thousands of people has already generated 1,400 articles.
Another interesting new wiki is Wikitravel, which Mayfield reports has generated 1,000 articles in seven months and is doubling its traffic every three months. Wikitravel bills itself as “a free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide.” To date, it has guides to 4,844 destinations and articles written and edited by “Wikitravelers” from around the globe. Want to know what to see, where to stay, and what to eat in Singapore, Cincinnati or Cape Town? Go to Wikitravel!
When it comes to aggregating dispersed snippets of public knowledge, what better challenge for wikis than to keep track of the spread of communicable diseases? With growing fears of a widespread flu pandemic, three enterprising bloggers recently started the Flu Wiki, “a new experiment in collaborative problem solving in public health.” (Again, thanks to Ross Mayfield of Many 2 Many.) The site intends to serve as:
- a reliable source of information, as neutral as possible, about important facts useful for a public health approach to pandemic influenza;
- a venue for anticipating the vast range of problems that may arise if a pandemic does occur; and
- a venue for thinking about implementable solutions to foreseeable problems.
The site’s hosts explain why they started the site:
“No one, in any health department or government agency, knows all the things needed to cope with an influenza pandemic. But it is likely someone knows something about some aspect of each of them and if we can pool and share our knowledge we can advance preparation for and the ability to cope with events. This is not meant to be a substitute for planning, preparation and implementation by civil authorities, but a parallel effort that complements, supports and extends those efforts.
bq. “The initial offerings are small and illustrative, in keeping with the limited resources of those of us who are turning the keys in the ignition for the first time. While we will continue to administer and maintain the Wiki, we are turning the wheel over to the community, to take it where the road leads us.”
Godspeed, Flu Wiki! You could prove to indispensable if and when a flu epidemic or pandemic arises. It seems quite clear, based on the three wikis here, that the full potential of collaborative knowledge-generation and problem-solving has barely been explored.
Tomorrow, other encouraging signs that the make-your-own culture movement is gaining some real traction, to the consternation of conventional mass media.