Being Beta

Exercises in the higher banter with One of 26. Elsewhere called 'poet of adland'. By a whipple-squeezer. Find out why being beta is the new alpha: betarish at googlemail dot com

Monday, December 07, 2009

Where Wikipedia isn't

As an addendum to my review of The Wikipedia Revolution and the story about the drop in editors on the English-language site, here's a report suggesting that there's plenty of scope for growth for the project, especially in developing world countries.

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Thursday, November 26, 2009

Review: The Wikipedia Revolution

My review of Andrew Lih's book has been published in this week's Times Literary Supplement. Obviously, it's not online, so I've posted a JPG and PDF.

As it was commissioned a few months ago, I haven't touched on the flare up this week regarding the number of editors leaving the site. For what it's worth, I don't think that the exodus will adversely affect the development of the English site much - it has stablised, and this is what you'd expect to happen when a period of explosive growth ends, as it clearly has.

I think the central thrust of my review still stands, the role of the 'cognitive surplus' - which went oddly unmentioned on last night's Newsnight. Those loosely tied to the project have left to find a new hobby to spend their surplus time and labour on.

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