- Is crowdsourcing losing its appeal?
- Is journalism threatened by Wikipedia?
Recently, the Economist published an article on crowdsourcing that discussed the past and future of this social medium where idea generation is outsourced to online crowds.
The author illustrated the success of crowdsourcing with examples drawn from Wikipedia, the Library of Congress (using Flikr) and Google.
According to article, the cost savings on crowdsourcing can evaporate when intellectual property such as product designs must be legally verified as to their ownership. In addition, a volunteer model such as Wikipedia would be disrupted should Wikipedia evolve to a for-profit business.
Next I turned to Wikipedia for their perspective on crowdsourcing.
I was interested to see that many of the same success stories and pros and cons on crowdsourcing were shared by the Economist and Wikipedia.
We know that Wikipedia has trumped Encyclopedia Britannica but does this extend to magazines such as the venerable Economist?
As Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams observe in the book Wikinomics, the strength of Wikipedia is the substantial number of edits made by the Wikipedia community of volunteers - an average of 20 edits per article. In a similar fashion to open source software, the community is constantly updating and revising articles.
Given this dynamic state, perhaps Wikipedia is as much to threat to journalism as YouTube is to TV.
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