<br>In the Wikipedia world, people get compensated by having their words represent topics they want to be known for understanding or being associated with. Or they may want to be more involved in a community that permits them to edit the words of others or provide/limit access to those topics. Money or external reputation, to date, have not been relevant. The recent illustration compensation was the first direct attempt to attract contributors with cash awards. The real money being made in the Wikipedia world may be to consultants paid to adjust content in articles to favor their client's specific agendas.
<br><br>Google's pushing a model in which people's content is paid for. This is a more Wikia-like approach. Google is simply cutting out the middle-man. If Google can charge less and provide access to more searchers than Wikia, Google will take business from Wikia.
<br><br>I don't see Wikipedia impacted greatly by this. Google clearly wants to find ways to starve the for-profit side of the Wikimedia Foundation of revenue . This keeps Wikimedia from developing a search engine better than the present one. A side benefit is that Google will deprive part of Wikipedia from referrals based upon the quality of the content. Since Google alone knows what they consider to be the best quality content, there will be some weighting of referrals to their own wiki site. This maximizes Google's revenue potential on the referral since Google knows that a Wikipedia referral will never directly be monetized but one to a Google wiki may.
<br><br>We'll never know whether this is happening since Google is 100% closed when it comes to the "how" of their page ratings system or of its history. Would Google ever choose to weight selections in favor of Google wiki pages that have ads on them versus those which do not? It's hard to say. I would suspect that their system will use internal semantic infrastructure that will allow them to more precisely choose a page based upon pure relevance than it does now on arbitrary web pages. If this is the case, Google will always be able to show that selection is made on a knowledge content basis, first and foremost. Will they surface how that knowledge is mapped? From their perspective, this would only lead to more information for unscrupulous advertisers use in gaming the system and ripping off Google and their customers.
<br><br>If Wikimedia, both Wikia and Wikipedia, succeeds in keeping viewers from navigating back to Google for searching, it will mean a lot of money and increased relevance for Wikia. Alexa ranks Wikia at 580 now. But they grew 51% in reach and over 250% in traffic in the last 3 months. Wikipedia hovers around thr 8th highest ranked site. These are daunting figures.
<br><br>Google still wants part of that growth for itself, despite the fact that Wikia's ad referrals also directly fueling Google's profits. All paid ads on Wikia are from Google. Google is throwing relatively cheap R&D/operation dollars at the issue. It's good business.
<br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Dec 14, 2007 9:59 AM, Ricardo Vidal <<a href="mailto:rvidal@gmail.com">rvidal@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
This could actually be a product of their acquisition of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JotSpot" target="_blank">JotSpot</a> - a structured wiki for small/medium sized businesses.<br><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div>
<div></div><div class="Wj3C7c">On Dec 14, 2007 1:46 PM, Barry Canton <
<a href="mailto:bcanton@mit.edu" target="_blank">bcanton@mit.edu</a>> wrote:<br></div></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div><div></div><div class="Wj3C7c">Google is testing a new project that sounds like an attempt to compete with Wikipedia.
<div><br></div><div><a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/encouraging-people-to-contribute.html" target="_blank">
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/encouraging-people-to-contribute.html</a></div><div><br></div><div>An interesting sentence - "<span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Arial;">
At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads."</span><br clear="all"><br>
--
<br>Barry Canton<br>Endy Lab<br>Biological Engineering Division<br>Massachusetts Institute of Technology<br><br>Tel.:(617) 401-7320 (Grand Central)<br>Email1: <a href="mailto:bcanton@mit.edu" target="_blank">bcanton@mit.edu
</a><br>Email2:
<a href="mailto:bcanton@gmail.com" target="_blank">bcanton@gmail.com</a>
</div></div></div>
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http://my.biotechlife.net</a><br>skype: icky_bu
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