Wikipedia and the Limits of Co-Creation(?)

This week my eye caught a blog post from New Scientist magazine speculating that Wikipedia might be heading for a fall. When I saw Fast Company add to the argument, it seemed that there was more than just passing interest in the research that spawned the article.  Wikipedia, the most widely used encyclopedic source in the world, has become the go-to place for people interested in both mainstream and obscure facts. In my view, it has become to information repositories what Google has become to the search; namely the first place people go when they need something specific.

Yet, Wikipedia is slowly losing its momentum. As Jim Giles reports, there is research from the Palo Alto Research Center in California (the once Xerox PARC for those who know about the early innovation in computing, design and systems there for many years) suggesting that : “The number of articles added per month flattened out at 60,000 in 2006 and has since declined by around a third. They also found that the number of edits made every month and the number of active editors both stopped growing the following year, flattening out at around 5.5 million and 750,000 respectively.”

The article speaks to the problems that Wikipedia is having with maintaining control and how it is limiting co-creation in some small, but persistent ways by exercising more editorial control over content and thereby reducing the number of words that were generated by members in total over those generated by Wikipedia editors. To some, the answer might be “so, what?”. Maybe this is a good thing that there is more control over the content, particularly given its wide interest? Although this has merit, there is a risk that by creating a content system that is more tightly controlled that Wikipedia is limiting the very power of self-organization and community building that made it so popular in the first place.

Co-creation is about developing a partnership between creators to truly collaborate on the text. This need not be equal in terms of time and energy — there is always some who are far more enthusiastic about a topic than others and will therefore take a larger role in writing — but that partnership needs to exist. Perhaps Wikipedia leaders need to get back to revisiting the very concepts that made them successful. The beauty of the wiki — and a popular one like Wikipedia — is that it:

1) provides a critical mass of engaged users;

2) encourages a diversity of voices participating in the conversation;

3) provides opportunities for expertise to be shared and leveraged;

4) offers a coordinating mechanism to bring together this diversity keeping the system closer to the ‘edge of chaos’ ;

5) promotes self-organization;

6) which increases the likelihood that new ideas will emerge from the collaborations.

These are all hallmarks of strong, creative, and (mostly) effective communities and fits very well with the lessons learned from complexity science and systems thinking. It also is what has made them so popular and widely used. Perhaps the leadership at Wikipedia has forgotten that.