![]() Not only does this seem inherently more difficult on a phone – while certain things, such as patrolling, could arguably be equally easy or easier on a phone if our workflows weren't still primarily built for desktop users, most find adding text and references easier with access to a bigger screen and a physical keyboard – but we have over the years erected barriers ourselves. The conflation of the reader and the writer, the erasure of the strict line between the two roles, depended on the readers having the tools to efficiently contribute. Wikipedia was created with the assumption that anyone reading it would also be sitting in front of a keyboard. Whether this is an indication of Wikipedia’s excellence or a reason for bleak despair as we look at how humans handle information may be in the eye of the beholder. It's not that Wikipedia is perfect, merely that we're probably way past the mark where additional quality will be attractive enough to change reader behaviour. We have years of continuous editing and improvements beyond that point. This isn't just because the Wikipedian system of quality control, chaotic as it seems in theory, sort of works in practice, and our articles are often quite good – but because Wikipedia was good enough for the readers to start using it a long time ago. ![]() The strong competitors to Wikipedia exist in languages where the Wikimedia movement has been obstructed, like Baidu Baike in China.Īnyone wanting to dislodge Wikipedia from its place in the information ecosystem can't have article quality as their main selling point. There is no oxygen left to breathe for an English encyclopedia competing in the same niche. No product can win by modestly improving what the users are already doing as human beings, we put a value on something simply because we are already using it. Most importantly, it doesn't matter if they succeed in their ambition or not: one can't dislodge a supremely dominant entity like Wikipedia – entrenched in the fabric of the internet, with superb name recognition, hundreds of thousands of editors – by doing the same thing but slightly better. Not only because some of these endeavours insist that key aspects behind Wikipedia's success, such as the low threshold of entry, are defects to correct. There have been attempts to do what Wikipedia does but better, like Citizendium or Everipedia. ![]() We just needed to be good enough, and then other factors – price, easy access – made all the difference. It seems largely irrelevant to readers' decision to use us as a source of information – for that, we didn't need to be good. In recent years, our reputation has changed for the better in countries like the United States or Sweden, as people belatedly realised that the Wikipedia of 2018 was not the same thing as the Wikipedia of 2004, but this was not necessarily correlated with increased readership in these areas. This echoes our experience: while Wikipedia's large language versions have long come out favourably in comparison to traditional printed encyclopedias, this largely happened after we achieved our position as the predominant source of information. A key observation in Christensen's book is how the new technology, a product that is a break from tradition rather than a continuous improvement of the existing technology, is typically not better than the one it is replacing, but merely cheaper, simpler, more convenient. In his widely influential 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma, American scholar of business administration Clayton Christensen investigated how dominant technologies are overtaken by new ones, and how the old organisations rarely managed to retain their positions as their industries shifted to a new paradigm. If Wikipedia one day is replaced, it likely won't be because someone does what we do better. When Wikipedia took over the world, it wasn't on the basis of article quality. This text is unrelated to his work, and the opinions expressed are his own. He's authored a book, Wikipedia inifrån (Wikipedia from the Inside ), published in 2022, and currently works for the Wikimedia Foundation's Product Department. ![]() Julle began editing the Swedish Wikipedia in 2004.
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