Wikipedia is often the first source consulted for information about an unfamiliar topic, but this was not always the case. For almost 250 years, Encyclopedia Britannica was the gold standard for authoritative reference works, delving into more than 65,000 topics with articles by some 4,000 scholarly contributors, including many by Nobel Laureates.

The beautiful leather-bound, multivolume set of books made a nice decorative item in many homes. In the early 1990s, when total sales for encyclopedias were over $1.2 billion annually, Encyclopedia Britannica was the undisputed market leader, holding more than 50 percent market share and earning some $650 million in revenues. Not surprisingly, its superior differentiated appeal was highly correlated with cost, reflected in its steep sticker price of up to $2,000.

Innovation changed all that. Banking on the widespread diffusion of the personal computer, Microsoft launched its electronic encyclopedia Encarta in 1993 at a price of $99. Although some viewed it as merely a CD-version of the lower-cost and lower-quality Funk & Wagnall's Encyclopedia sold in supermarkets, Encarta still took a big bite out of Britannica's market.

Within only three years, the market for printed encyclopedias had shrunk by half, along with Britannica's revenues, while Microsoft sold over $100 million worth of Encarta CDs.

In 2001, Internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales launched Wikipedia, the free online multi-language encyclopedia. In Hawaiian, wiki means quick, referring to the instant do-it-yourself editing capabilities of the site. Wikipedia is a nonprofit venture supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, which obtains its funding from donations. Wikipedia now has 26 million articles in 285 languages, including over 4.2 million items in English.

Wikipedia's slogan is " the Free Encyclopedia that anyone can edit. " Since it is open source, any person, expert or novice, can contribute content and edit pages using the handy "edit this page" button. It also draws on tens of thousands of volunteer editors, who monitor and validate content by consensus. Although Wikipedia's volume of English entries is almost 65 times greater than that of Britannica, the site is not as error-prone as you might think. The free online encyclopedia relies on the wisdom of the crowds, which assumes "the many" often know more than "the expert." Moreover, user-generated content needs to be verifiable by reliable sources such as links to reputable websites. A peer-reviewed study by Nature of selected science topics found that the error rate of Wikipedia and Britannica was roughly the same. Yet, Wikipedia's crowdsourcing approach to display user-generated content is not without criticism.

The most serious are that the content may be unreliable and unauthoritative, that it could exhibit systematic bias, and that group dynamics might prevent objective and factual reporting.

Wikipedia leverages technological innovation afforded by the Internet combined with a crowdsourcing approach to content development and maintenance. Beyond the technical challenges of web interfaces, servers, and bandwidth for delivery is a sometimes-overlooked capability: the Wikipedians themselves. Over 32 million people have registered accounts to contribute edits to Wikipedia. More than 300,000 users provide edits to the website at least once a month. These volunteers build the content for the site, using a creative commons license that ensures free access to any of the 500 million unique visitors each month.

This crowdsourcing and its legal underpinnings are successful only as long as individuals are willing to spend their own time contributing to the site for no pay or other extrinsic benefits. The ability to attract and utilize legions of interested individuals is vital to the success of Wikipedia both today and into the future.

Moreover, Wikipedia is a nonprofit, free-of-advertising social entrepreneurship venture that is exclusively financed by donations. Wikipedia runs regular calls for donations using slogans such as: "Please help us feed the servers," "We make the Internet not suck. Help us out," and "We are free, our bandwidth isn't!". Calls for donations also come in the form of personal appeals by co-founder Jimmy Wales. The question arises whether the donation model is sustainable given not only the increasing demand for Wikipedia's services, but also the emergence of competitors.

Wikipedia might not be as error-prone in science topics as shown in the Nature study mentioned earlier, because most entries on Wikipedia are not about science. Wikipedia maintains that it fosters a "neutral point of view." A recent research study tested this claim.

In particular, a study of 28,000 articles about U.S. politics revealed a significant bias. On average, Wikipedia entries lean left of center. Initial entries arrive with a slant, and change little over time. This bias is more pronounced in earlier Wikipedia articles. The authors call this the "vintage bias." Although the degree of slant in Wikipedia articles changes little over time, more recent political entries are more balanced.

One reason the authors put forth to explain the vintage effect is that in the early days of Wikipedia, only technology enthusiasts and early adopters participated, and this demographic tends to lean left. The shift toward a more "neutral point of view" over the years has arisen from the growth of Wikipedia, bringing in the early and late majority as contributors.

REQUIRED:

1. What can Wikipedia do to maintain and grow its ability to harness the crowdsourcing of its "Wikipedians" to maintain high-quality and quickly updated content?

Note: It can be in paragraph or bullet form and are limited to three to five sentences only.