Wikipedia: monopoly

When we usually think of monopolies, we think of for-profit corporate companies. For instance, Microsoft, at a certain point, had a near-monopoly on operating systems software (today, there is significant competition from Linux, Apple and many others). The monopoly didn’t materialize. In a similar manner, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, currently has a near monopoly on the encyclopedia business. Again, the monopoly isn’t likely to materialize, but it does give some very clear lessons on how to try monopolizing.

1. Create strong disincentives for competition: Wikipedia has done this in two ways. The first is that it’s free, easy to access, and ad-free. It’s run by a nonprofit organization. This means that competitors aren’t naturally excited about competing with it. I mean, how do you get cheaper than free? It’s a hard question and definitely not an attraction for budding competitors.

   More importantly, Wikipedia works by simply making competition seem silly, and that’s where its “anybody can edit” comes in. Ordinarily, when a big company starts off with a closed system that’s highly popular, other companies want to emulate that system, or provide a comparable system, to increase diversity. But Wikipedia literally made it appear as if people seeking diversity were party-poopers. Instead of trying to start something else, why don’t you go and edit on Wikipedia? Nice way of discouraging competition.

2. Keep costs low. Emphasize costs over quality. Outsource. And to top it all, appear virtuous about it: Wikipedia is built almost entirely on volunteer labor. Most of the labor goes unpaid. Most of our contributions to the Wikimedia Foundation don’t go to all the people who worked hard over all the articles. They go to just pay for the servers, and pay for a few people who are managing the project. Simply speaking, Wikipedia isn’t sustainable if it starts paying people for the tremendous work that goes into writing quality entries.

   But the genius of this has been to turn this apparent drawback: that Wikipedia can’t compensate people for their tremendous effort, into a virtue. Contribute to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, and achieve immortality as somebody who wanted to share knowledge for free. The moral boost is certainly better than working to write a book or journal article at a miserable rate of under $1 per hour. And it’s certainly great for people who’d otherwise never write anything at all.

   And when it comes to questions about whether anonymous editing is responsible for vandalism, Wikipedia’s clear about one thing: nothing should be done to raise the barrier to editing. Anonymous editing is a small price we pay for the tremendous amount of volunteer labor that can be tapped into. Like Walmart, keeping costs low is the top priority, no matter where the supplies come from. The human cost of editors getting disgusted with edit wars, or of people’s biographies getting disrupted by malice is small compared to the benefits of providing people with cheap, nay, free stuff.

3. Be there first, and bear the losses: Simple, and mind-blowing idea: build a free encyclopedia. Laughable? Still, doesn’t hurt to try. Wikipedia became this free encyclopedia even though Encyclopedia Britannica, after trying to have its encyclopedia entries online, had been unable to cope with the traffic loads. But Wikipedia persevered.
4. Choose a killer license: Licenses certainly help. Patents and restrictive copyright licenses are one way to go. But copyleft licensing is the other way to go. By adopting the GNU Free Documentation License, Wikipedia’s winning friends and shooting down enemies. First, Wikipedia wins all the people who’ve mouthed the words “free” and “open” as the new catch-words. We have Richard Stallman abandoning GNUPedia to whole-heartedly endorse Wikipedia. And then, aren’t our volunteers touched that their no-rewards effort will be under a license that’ll allow anybody to reproduce the stuff?

   Secondly, the killer license means that any competitor is, almost by force, chosen to adopt a similar license, if they want to attract the same kind of love and attention. But the great thing about the license is that you can copy back from them. So any competitor to Wikipedia can be absorbed by Wikipedia in a single swallow. Merger? No, you don’t even need to consult the competitor before absorbing them.

   Wikipedia’s recently been making bigger moves. With the advent of Creative Commons, the move forward for Wikipedia is clear. Convert Wikipedia’s GFDL into CC. True, this’ll require a bit of rewriting, but it means Wikipedia’s suddenly won over the support and endorsement of CC. Good for Wikipedia, because CC has around 50 million products under its licenses. Good for both parties, in fact, because this suddenly means an additional 10 million articles for CC, and makes Wikipedia part of the “share, remix and reuse” culture. Not surprisingly, Larry Lessig, the author of Code v 2 (a great book that everybody should read), dedicates the book to Wikipedia.

Hmmm. Reminded of Microsoft, Walmart, and Google? Money really isn’t the only route to power, apparently. It’s about fame and clicks, and winning over the hearts of people who have the right ideological mindset.

Now, this isn’t meant to be a criticism of Wikipedia (apologies if it appeared that way). And while I’m at it, let me mention a few things commonly attributed to Wikipedia’s success, that, in my opinion, have very little to do with its success.

1. An open and collaborative process: A large number of Wikipedia’s editors are anonymous users, and even the logged-in users rarely disclose their real names or affiliations, even in articles where a clear conflict of interest could develop. The process that goes into article creation and the many discussion points are rarely put forward in a palatable manner, that people who come to the article can read and understand. Very few people actually collaborate and discuss the many facets of article structuring. Rather, it’s just a sequence of one edit after another, which includes reverting past edits, unreverting them, putting up articles for deletion, flagging articles that violate NPOV, and so on. Not exactly the ideal collaborative process, and far from open. To top it all, whenever an article starts to feel the heat, administrators emerge and make arbitrary decisions about the fate of the article.
2. The wiki model: The wiki model is cool for collaboration, and certainly the best I’ve seen so far, and my admiration goes for Magnus Manske, Brion Vibber, Tim Starling, and the many others who have worked to make the software better over the years. However, the wiki model isn’t in itself responsible for magic. I think this is best seen in the fact that a lot of places have tried to adopt the wiki approach and it has failed. Most notably, some of Wikipedia’s sister sites, that include Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikinews, and Wikiversity, are still growing at a remarkably slow rate.
3. A cohort of exceptionally minded and brilliantly talented people at the center who coordinate the efforts of volunteers in a great way to maintain an exceptional encyclopedia: Hardly. There are some administrators at the center of Wikipedia, and some of them are doing a good job (though by no means all). But there’s little evidence to suggest that the core body of administrators has worked to push through new and innovative initiatives, or to handle many of Wikipedia’s pressing problems, efficiently and creatively. Most of the administrators are people who have little by way of solid experience in the skills of organizing knowledge and ideas before they joined Wikipedia, and in fact many of them have very little “cool stuff” to boast of even re: their activities in Wikipedia (unless you count banning members, knowing the rulebook of NPOV and NN, and winning AfD debates as cool stuff).

What gives? Why do I think Wikipedia will be unable to sustain its monopoly? First, there’s the repeated scandals confronting the Wikimedia Foundation, many of which are summarized well at Wikipedia Watch and Wikitruth.info. But, whether or not you pay importance to these scandals, the key point is that in the recent past, Wikipedia has systematically failed to innovated. There have been innovations and improvements from the software side, but the community has failed to become more organized, and the encyclopedia continues to be edited in a reactionary and patched fashion rather than addressing core issues.

Secondly, it’s clear that the Wikimedia Foundation continues to steadfastly believe in the magic of wikis, with the growth of projects like Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, and Wikiversity. Ironically, many of these have better design than Wikipedia, yet that lack the key elements that Wikipedia had: it was first in, and it stood brave. Had Encyclopedia Britannica been completely online and incorporated user feedback in an easy way, Wikipedia might never have taken off the way it did. As it stands, Wikinews is a singularly unattractive proposition when practically all the print and television news channels put up the bulk of their stuff for free over the Internet, and are complemented by the blogosphere. This doesn’t mean it can never grow. It probably will grow, if it’s fundamentals are in the right place. But it cannot acquire the monopoly that the Wikipedia did, juts because it is “free”.

Similarly, wikisource may be a cool place to locate the source for books in the public domain, but who’d bother when there’s Google Books and many other ways to get the books? Wikisource has to offer something new and something distinctive. And who’d want to go to Wikiversity when there are resources like MIT Open CourseWare and Connexions? In fact, the Wikimedia Foundation itself seems to have decided that promoting these other projects is a non-starter, so it’s living with their tortoise-pace growth as it continues to allow media attention to shower on Wikipedia.

More importantly, competition to Wikipedia has begun in real earnest now. Most of the initial competition to Wikipedia was reactionary: let’s monetize the model by using Wikipedia content with ads. Then came Scholarpedia and the Digital Universe. Though neither took off dramatically, they were at least somewhat well-planned. And finally, we have a serious contender to Wikipedia: the Citizendium. With 6000 articles compared to Wikipedia’s 2.7 million, the Citizendium doesn’t quite look formidable yet. However, they have a sense of community and a vision for the future, and they’re not blindly aping “what worked” for Wikipedia. Rather, careful thought is being given to redesigning fundamentals. It remains to be seen where the Citizendium goes.

Finally, there’s Google Knol. This is the Google idea of having “units of knowledge”. People write signed articles, that are the first thing anybody searching on the subject should read. Needless to say, Google’s search engine will help readers reach this first thing. My guess is that Google is finding the Knol fairly hard to implement, which is why we haven’t heard from from them since December 12, 2007, when they first officially announced it. But if they do manage to get the balance right, it could be an important alternative knowledge source for people.

In other words, you can become a monopoly in anything: provided the conditions are right. Profit, restrictive licensing, or closed code isn’t necessary to achieve monopolistic control. But maintaining a monopoly requires something more than just what is needed to create it. To maintain a monopoly, one needs to constantly innovate and provide solutions to the core weaknesses rather than be reactionary and do patch-fixing. This is something Wikipedia has failed to do, and it remains to be seen how long it is before they’re displaced from the top.