On this blog and at the Wikipedia Weekly podcast, we have been critical about the challenges Wikipedia faces, and what this means for reliability and growth. This comes from a desire of wanting to see the Wikipedia revolution continue. So it’s important to reabsorb how far ahead Wikipedia’s lead still is, as Hitwise shows exactly how dominant it has become [ref]:

A day after Encyclopaedia Britannica renewed its vow to make an online push, it became clear how steep of a climb it faces.

Wikipedia received 97 percent of the visits U.S. Web surfers made to online encyclopedias last week, Web monitoring company Hitwise said Friday.

MSN Encarta was second with 1.27 percent of visits, followed by Encyclopedia.com (0.76 percent), Fact Monster (0.72 percent) and, in fifth place, Britannica.com (0.57 percent). Britannica.com’s share of U.S. visits dropped 53 percent last month compared with December 2007, Hitwise said.

Ouch, 97%. That’s even larger market share than Microsoft Windows had at its peak.

If Wikipedia was a for-profit entity, I could imagine anti-trust issues coming up.

Looks like Wikipedia has a celebrity fan, as Jessica Alba invoked it in her battle with Bill O’Reilly:

I find it depressing that in the midst of perhaps the most salient time in our country’s history, individuals are taking it upon themselves to encourage negativity and stupidity. Last week, Mr. Bill O’Reilly and some really classy sites (i.e.TMZ) insinuated I was dumb by claiming Sweden was a neutral country. I appreciate the fact that he is a news anchor and that gossip sites are inundated with intelligent reporting, but seriously people…it’s so sad to me that you think the only neutral country during WWII was Switzerland. Check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_during_World_War_II if you want to see what I was referring to. I appreciate the name calling and the accurate reporting. Keep it up!! [ref]

Jessica had me when she used “salient” properly.

Odd fact: I happen to be well versed in the Switzerland/Sweden conundrum. As a delegate on an American-Swiss Foundation trip in 2000, this was a common lament from the Swiss side, that IKEA and meatballs were too often wrongly associated with the tiny Alpine nation.

For photo enthusiasts, you’ll want to see the post over at Infodisiac, where they talk about the Gigapan, a robotic device to precisely snap tiled photos with a simple consumer-grade digital camera. The resulting images can be stitched together to make massive, greater than 50 megapixel images. Inspired by the famous Obama inauguration photo using this technique, Wikipedian Richard Palmer describes how this could be great for creating photos in Wikimedia Commons. [ref]

Best of all, the Gigapan costs less than US$300 right now as a “beta” price. I’m tempted…

But I fear setting up this rig in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square or Forbidden City would get me carted away by security. It doesn’t look much different than digital surveying equipment or a military-grade precision guidance device.

This week might just have been the spark for the next phase in Wikipedia’s evolution. The public embarrassment for the online encyclopedia that “anyone can edit” was the Washington Post publicizing short-lived errors in the articles for Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd, two US senators that had to excuse themselves on inauguration day for health and other reasons [ref]. To be fair, the WaPost article exaggerated the importance of this run-of-the-mill vandalism in Wikipedia that existed only for a number of minutes. There were probably a few hundred or a thousand people who might have seen that error, but likely no more. Far less harmful than an errant AP news or wire story.

But this was reason enough to cause Jimmy Wales to “sigh” and push for the implementation of Flagged Revisions, a feature that would show the casual readers of Wikipedia a version of an article that had been approved (ie. flagged) at a very basic level by editors. Even before this incident, there was a fairly well publicized straw poll to gauge interest among the frequent Wikpedians. (I say “fairly well publicized” because the announcement showed up primarily when people loaded their Watchlist, which I don’t often do. I was informed by other Wikipedians by chance.) Wales said on his talk page:

This nonsense would have been 100% prevented by Flagged Revisions. It could also have been prevented by protection or semi-protection, but this is a prime example of why we don’t want to protect or semi-protect articles – this was a breaking news story and we want people to be able to participate (so protection is out) and even to participate in good faith for the first time ever (so semi-protection is out).

We have a tool available now that is (a) consistent with higher quality (b) will allow us to allow more people to edit it a wider range of circumstances and (c) will prevent certain kinds of BLP harm.

Flagged revisions has roughly a 60/40 for/against at the straw poll. I was dismayed that it took place on a rather obscure location: a subpage of a talk page of a policy page, and didn’t quite get the due diligence of a widespread announcement. Nevertheless, there are some good points raised by folks in reaction to the poll — for substantial policy changes in Wikipedia, how realistic is it to get the overwhelming consensus of 75% or more? Things in Wikipedia have almost always moved forward with the will and prodding of Wales, as a benevolent dictator, without such high consensus numbers. This was the case with the Seigenthaler incident that led to anonymous users not being able to create articles, and also the biography of living persons policy that has become a solid part of the editing guidelines.

Noam Cohen at the NY Times has a good writeup on this as well, describing the dynamics of the debate. In the end, there is going to be a bit of a crisis about jurisdiction, as Wales has requested:

“To the Wikimedia Foundation: per the poll of the English Wikipedia community and upon my personal recommendation, please turn on the flagged revisions feature as approved in the poll.”

Why is this an important turning point? It’s arguably the first major change to en.wikipedia that seeks the authority of the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, with a strong hierarchical management layer of executive director (Sue Gardner), deputy director (Erik Moeller) and chief technology officer (Brion Vibber) to act on the request of Wales and the will of the community per the straw poll. This is quite different than in the past, with Brion Vibber and other technical team members making a field decision, based on Jimbo’s recommendation and testing the winds of the community.

It will be interesting to see if this dual-appeal to official authority (WMF) and authority based on historic social capital will win out and become the norm.

Meanwhile, it’s good to see Brion Vibber approach this carefully and with sensible goals. His response:

I just want to note that we would not turn FlaggedRevs on here on enwiki before working out some very specific parameters for the test first. Keeping an eye on workflow and seeing what can be streamlined or taken out would be very much part of our attention.

This is a notable word of caution by Brion — flagged revisions will be no panacea. It has the risk of submerging and pushing the problem of edit warring and inaccurate edits into another unknown, and perhaps harder to track, domain if editors are not used to seeing how flagged revision modifications are reflected in the recent changes list or their watchlist. Are the tools ready to track and flag? Is the community “tight” enough so that flagged revisions can be turned on with the same concept of what being “flagged” or “sighted” means?

For English editors who voted “yes” — you should really look at the German experience to know what you voted “yes” on exactly. On the Wikipedia Weekly podcast episode 56, we had the pleasure of interviewing Phil Birken of the German Wikipedia who was in charge of turning on and monitoring flagged revisions there. Take a listen at the Wikipedia Weekly web site.